ABSTRACT
Despite ongoing increases in the speed and power of computers, the memory and processor requirements of large GA-based programs remain a concern for programmers. Presented is a C language implementation of bit-level chromosome storage and manipulation routines that offer substantial memory savings over the more commonly used array-based representations. Simple genetic algorithm (SGA)-C is a freely available suite of C language functions for building GA-based programs. SGA-C was developed using as a basis Goldberg’s SGA code written in Pascal. To aid in understanding the code and its operations and functions, a simplified model of a part of a computer’s memory is employed. This is an abstract representation and should not be taken as corresponding to any particular hardware. The C language is independent of memory architecture with respect to the number of bytes used for some data types. The unsigned integers are labelled from zero to be consistent with the C language addressing scheme.
