3 ms·
GAs are a lot of fun, but a lot of the time they are very time-consuming in the case of fairly straightforward optimisation problems. Other iterative searches l
by jacques_chester 7y ago
GAs are a lot of fun, but a lot of the time they are very time-consuming in the case of fairly straightforward optimisation problems. Other iterative searches like simulated annealing or just plain ol' dumb hill climbing is a lot faster most of the time.
- jhbadger 7y agoYeah, evolution is amazing as a biological process precisely because no intelligence is needed to get results, albeit after millions or billions of years. But given that we do have intelligence, reliance on a blind method seems pointless other than as a demonstration as in Dawkins' "weasel" demo, that it can work.
- horyzen 7y agoI worked on both GA and SA and I think it really depends. There are some effective evolution strategies that can speed up the evolution, combine that with a parallel implementation GA can be really fast. But yeah it can take time to figure out a good evolution strategy and SA can solve some problems just fine.
- marcosdumay 7y agoIf your problem is simple enough for solving with SA (let's face it, most problems are), there is really no gain on using GA. Genetic algorithms beat simulated annealing when different dimensions of your solution interact strongly and unpredictably, SA and gradient searches completely fail at those cases.