Running Races with Fraser’s Recombination

Several recombination operators have been proposed in evolutionary computation. Standard procedures include one-point, two-point, and uniform crossover. Little attention, however, has been given to a recombination operator that preceded each of these, which was offered in 1957 by Alex Fraser. Fraser’s recombination assigns a variable probability for crossing over between two solutions at each locus. This operator subsumes the three standard forms of crossover. Experiments are conducted on a set of 10 test functions where individuals in a population are tagged to recombine in one of the four above-mentioned ways. Attention is focused on the relative performance of the various methods of recombination. Uniform crossover is seen to offer the greatest utility on the test functions, and Fraser’s recombination repeatedly outperforms one-point and two-point crossover. Several issues of the experimental design are discussed.