Effects of phenotypic feedback and the coupling of genotypic and phenotypic spaces in genetic searches

Abstract

The class of genetic algorithms (Gas) is a member of the evolutionary algorithms (EAs). In Gas, a solution is considered as a phenotype and the chromosome representation is a genotype. In a canonical GA, the genotypic search space could be tightly coupled with the phenotypic solution space under a specific encoding scheme. Variants of the canonical Gas are developed based on how the problem is represented in both the genotypic space and phenotypic space. This paper focuses on Gas that utilizes both genotypic and phenotypic spaces and investigates some of the effects of the coupling of the two spaces.