Oversized Populations and Cooperative Selection: Dealing with Massive Resources in Parallel Infrastructures

This paper proposes a new selection scheme for Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) based on altruistic cooperation between individuals. Cooperation takes place every time an individual undergoes selection: the individual decreases its own fitness in order to improve the mating chances of worse individuals. On the one hand, the selection scheme guarantees that the genetic material of fitter individuals passes to subsequent generations as to decrease their fitnesses individuals have to be firstly selected. On the other hand, the scheme restricts the number of times an individual can be selected not to take over the entire population. We conduct an empirical study for a parallel EA version where cooperative selection scheme is shown to outperform binary tournament: both selection schemes yield the same qualities of solutions but cooperative selection always improves the times to solutions.