Competition-Based Learning

This paper summarizes recent research on competition-based learning procedures performed by the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence at the Naval Research Laboratory. We have focused on a particularly interesting class of competition-based techniques called genetic algorithms. Genetic algorithms are adaptive search algorithms based on principles derived from the mechanisms of biological evolution. Recent results on the analysis of the implicit parallelism of alternative selection algorithms are summarized, along with an analysis of alternative crossover operators. Applications of these results in practical learning systems for sequential decision problems and for concept classification are also presented. INTRODUCTION One approach to the design of more flexible computer systems is to extract heuristics from existing adaptive systems. We have focused on a class of learning systems that use competition-based procedures, called genetic algorithms (GAs). GAs are ba..