Investigating a Measure of the Recombinational Distance Traversed by the Genetic Algorithm

Measures of distance are essential to the development of many applications, but the need for these measures to be representative is often ignored measures that truly represent the manner in which solution space is traversed are often disregarded in favour of simpler measures. With the genetic algorithm employing both unary and binary operators, it is difficult to quantify the distance between chromosomes with an approach that is truly representative of the distances traversed by the evolutionary mechanism. It is, however, possible to redefine the function of recombination to facilitate a more representative measure. The recursive approach presented here entails the redefinition of recombination as a set of unary operators determined by the current population. These operators replicate the behaviour of the original operator precisely and can be used to calculate the recombinational distance between chromosomes with a time complexity that is improved logarithmically over a simplistic approach.