Evolutionsstrategie: Optimierung Technischer Systeme Nach Prinzipien Der Biologischen Evolution, 1973 (; backlinks; similar):
The biological method of evolution is postulated to be an optimal strategy to adapt organisms to their environment. Therefore it may be promising to optimize engineering systems applying principles of biological evolution.
Laboratory experiments demonstrate that the simple biological mechanism of mutation and selection can be used successfully to evolve optimal systems in the field of fluid dynamics. A better imitation of the hereditary rules of higher organisms considerably improves the effectiveness of the evolutionary strategy.
Finally a theory is developed, which is based upon the assumption, that the quality of an engineering system can be compared with the fitness of a living organism. It results in a formula for the rate of convergence of the evolutionary strategy. This formula is then used to calculate the time of evolution required for the transition from the first living cell to present-day species.
[PhD thesis (in German) of Ingo Rechenberg, an early research in evolutionary computation; this thesis introduces a simple blackbox optimization method, “evolution strategies”, which can optimize even extremely complex things like neural networks by an iterative process of jittering the initial input with random noise to obtain n mutated variants, running them all through an ‘environment’ to measure ‘fitness’ of some sort, keeping the best-ranked point, and jittering again, etc. This constructs a ‘cloud’ of mutants around a prototype, and approximates a gradient in hill climbing.]
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