On the Relations Between Search and Evolutionary Algorithms

Evolutionary algorithms are powerful techniques for optimisation whose operation principles are inspired by natural selection and genetics. In this paper we discuss the relation between evolutionary techniques, numerical and classical search methods and we show that all these methods are instances of a single more general search strategy, which we call thèevolutionary computation cookbook'. By combining the features of classical and evolutionary methods in diierent ways new instances of this general strategy can be generated, i.e. new evolutionary (or classical) algorithms can be designed. One such algorithm, GA , is described.