ABSTRACT
The extreme diversity of life forms on our planet is a testament to the many ways in which millions of different species have adapted to the huge number of biological niches that are available ranging, as they do, over extremes in temperature and pressure in air, land, and water. Viewed in an abstracted formulation, we may consider evolutionary adaptation of species within a biological niche to be a robust search and optimization mechanism (Fogel, 1994), the phenotype changing over time so that the species survives in its competitive environment. Under the Darwinian view, evolutionary processes are involved with reproduction, mutation, competition, and selection. The bioinspired strategies of genetic algorithms and evolutionary optimization, in general, strive to capture these biologically robust search mechanisms by formulating mathematical models that search function domains using algorithmic procedures that mimic some of the evolutionary processes of the cell, for example, mutation, and crossover. Before discussing these procedures, let us go over a superficial but quick review of the main biological events in the cell.
