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One serious problem of standard Genetic Programming (GP) is that evolved structures appear to drift towards large and slow forms on average. This paper presents a novel analysis of the role played by variable complexity in the selection and survival of GP expressions. It deenes a particular property of GP representations, called rooted tree-schema, that sheds light on the role of variable compl...

Selection and genetic drift are often competing forces in shaping genetic structure in populations. Genetic drift will often effectively cancel out the effect of selection when population sizes are small, such as in colonizing island populations. On a small island in the Skeppsvik Archipelago in northern Sweden, a newly founded population of Silene dioica has been monitored since it first estab...

We noted in Chapter 2 that when operating as the sole evolutionary force, random genetic drift leads inevitably to the loss of alleles within populations as well as to the fixation of alternative alleles in different populations. These conclusions extend logically to quantitative characters. Following a reduction in population size, for example, we expect the genetic variance within populations...

Genetic Algorithms (GA’s) are of particular significance in applications with highly irregular search spaces, especially when the computing power requirement for exhaustive search is prohibitively large. GA’s are capable of finding near optimal solutions and highly amenable to parallelism and hence Distributed Genetic Algorithms (DGA’s) present an efficient solution to the time requirement issu...

HE investigation reported in the present paper is of the effects of genetic T drift in three experimental populations of Drosophila melanogastar, two of which received treatments with gamma rays. Although there has been considerable theoretical discussion of genetic drift, few experimental studies of this phenomenon have been carried out. This paucity of experimental verification exists in spit...