From recombination of genes to the estimationof distributions

The Breeder Genetic Algorithm (BGA) is based on the equation for the response to selection. In order to use this equation for prediction , the variance of the tness of the population has to be estimated. For the usual sexual recombination this can be diicult. In this paper the new points (oospring) are generated from distributions, a uniform distribution and a distribution generated by univariate marginal distributions. For a class of unimodal tness functions the performance of the BGA is analytically computed. The results are compared to gene recom-bination methods. The uniform distribution is approximately generated by line recombination; recombination methods acting independently on each gene approximate the second distribution.