ABSTRACT
Work on what is nowadays called evolutionary computation started in the sixties of the 20th century in the United States and Germany. There have been two basic approaches in computer science that copy evolutionary mechanisms: evolution strategies (ES) and genetic algorithms (GA). Genetic algorithms go back to Holland [Hol75], 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 genetic algorithms are much closer to the biological model than evolution strategies. The theoretical foundations of evolution strategies were formed by Rechenberg and Schwefel (see for example [Rec73] or [Sch94]), whose primary goal was optimization. Although these two concepts have many aspects in common, they developed almost independently from each other in the USA (where GAs were developed) and Germany (where research was done on ES).
