Symbiosis, Synergy and Modularity: Introducing the Reciprocal Synergy Symbiosis Algorithm

Symbiosis, the collaboration of multiple organisms from different species, is common in nature. A related phenomenon, symbiogenesis, the creation of new species through the genetic integration of symbionts, is a powerful alternative to crossover as a variation operator in evolutionary algorithms. It has inspired several previous models that use the repeated composition of pre-adapted entities. In this paper we introduce a new algorithm utilizing this concept of symbiosis which is simpler and has a more natural interpretation when compared with previous algorithms. In addition it achieves success on a broader class of modular problems than some prior methods.