Understanding the Semantics of the Genetic Algorithm in Dynamic Environments

Researchers examining genetic algorithms (GAs) in applied settings rarely have access to anything other than fitness values of the best individuals to observe the behavior of the GA. In particular, researchers do not know what schemata are present in the population. Even when researchers look beyond best fitness values, they concentrate on either performance related measures like average fitness and robustness, or low-level descriptions like bit-level diversity measures. To understand the behavior of the GA on dynamic problems, it would be useful to track what is occurring on the “semantic” level of schemata. Thus in this paper we examine the evolving “content” in terms of schemata, as the GA solves dynamic problems. This allows us to better understand the behavior of the GA in dynamic environments. We finish by summarizing this knowledge and speculate about future work to address some of the new problems that we discovered during these experiments.