Cooperative Selection: Improving Tournament Selection via Altruism

This paper analyzes the dynamics of a new selection scheme based on altruistic cooperation between individuals. The scheme, which we refer to as cooperative selection, extends from tournament selection and imposes a stringent restriction on the mating chances of an individual during its lifespan: winning a tournament entails a depreciation of its fitness value. We show that altruism minimizes the loss of genetic diversity while increasing the selection frequency of the fittest individuals. An additional contribution of this paper is the formulation of a new combinatorial problem for maximizing the similarity of proteins based on their secondary structure. We conduct experiments on this problem in order to validate cooperative selection. The new selection scheme outperforms tournament selection for any setting of the parameters and is the best trade-off, maximizing genetic diversity and minimizing computational efforts.