ABSTRACT
As a recognized field, evolutionary computation is quite young. The term itself was invented as recently as 1991, and it represents an effort to bring together researchers who have been following different approaches to simulating various aspects of evolution. These techniques of genetic algorithms (Chapter 7), evolution strategies (Chapter 8), and evolutionary programming (Chapter 9) have one fundamental commonality: they each involve the reproduction, random variation, competition, and selection of contending individuals in a population. These form the essential essence of evolution, and once these four processes are in place, whether in nature or in a computer, evolution is the inevitable outcome (Atmar 1994). The impetus to simulate evolution on a computer comes from at least four directions.
