Multi-layered Niche Formation

Recently an abstraction of Genetic Algorithms has been developed in which a population of GAs in any epoch is represented by a single vector whose elements are the the probabilities of the corresponding bit positions being equivalent to 1. The process of evolution is represented by learning the elements of the probability vector. We have previously extended this to model homeotic genes which are environmentally driven and turn other genes on and oo. In this paper we incrementally develop the algorithm on a set of standard problems used to compare methods for the simultaneous optimisation of connicting criteria within a single population.