A Normed Space of Genetic Operators with Applications to Scalability Issues

We define an abstract normed vector space where the genetic operators are elements. This is used to define the disturbance of the generational operator G as the distance between the crossover and mutation operator (combined) and the identity. This quantity appears in a bound on the variance of fixed-point populations, and in a bound on the force //v - G(v)// that applies to the optimal population v. When analyzed for the case of fixed-length binary strings, a connection is shown between these measures and the size of the search space. Guides for parameter settings are given, if population convergence is required as the string length tends to infinity.