ABSTRACT
The classical representation used in so-called canonical genetic algorithms consists of binary vectors (often called bitstrings or binary strings) of fixed length ; that is, the individual space I is given by I = {0, 1} and individuals a ∈ I are denoted as binary vectors a = (a1, . . . , a) ∈ {0, 1} (see the book by Goldberg (1989)). The mutation operator (Section 32.1) then typically manipulates these vectors by randomly inverting single variables ai with small probability, and the crossover operator (Section 33.1) exchanges segments between two vectors to form offspring vectors.
