Using Multiple Representations in Evolutionary Algorithms

Although evolutionary algorithms are very different from other artificial intelligence search algorithms, they face similar fundamental issues — representation and search. There have been a large amount of work done in evolutionary computation on search, such as recombination operators, mutation operators, selection schemes and various specialised operators. In comparison, research in different representations has not been as active. Most of such research has been focused on a single representation, e.g., bit strings, real-valued vectors using cartesian coordinates, etc. This paper proposes and studies multiple representations in an evolutionary algorithm and shows empirically how multiple representations can benefit search as much as a good search operator could.