ABSTRACT

Work on what is nowadays called evolutionary computation started in the 1960s in the United States and Germany. There have been two basic approaches in computer science that copy evolutionary mechanisms: evolution strategies (ESs) and genetic algorithms (GAs). GAs go back to Holland,[1] an American computer scientist and psychologist who developed his theory not only under the aspect of solving optimization problems but also to study self-adaptiveness in biological processes. Essentially, this is the reason why GAs are much closer to the biological model than ESs. The theoretical foundations of ESs were formed by Rechenberg[2] and Schwefel,[3] whose primary goal was optimization. Although these two concepts have many aspects in common, they developed almost independently from each other in the United States (where GAs were developed) and Germany (where research was done on ES).