A remark to this thread:
Dean_Swan@Mitel.COM wrote:
As I said, I'll have to play around with what you've done. Speed is
extremely important for genetic algorithms, since for non-trivial applications, you may have to run it for thousands or even millions of generations (assuming you start from a completely random population) to get a usable answer.
It's true that speed is important for evolutionary algorithms.
I have used them for optimization of image processing operations. In this area the to be optimized evaluation function tooks almost whole of the computation time, time consumed in EA algorithms outside the evaluation function was negligible.
So for *me* flexibility and readability have priority over the last bit of speed regarding EA implementations (outside the evaluation function).
Greetings,
Stephan