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The no free lunch and realistic search algorithms

Published: 08 July 2006 Publication History

Abstract

The No-Free-Lunch theorems (NFLTs) are criticized for being too general to be of any relevance to the real world scenario. This paper investigates, both formally and empirically, the implications of the NFLTs for realistic search algorithms. In the first part of the paper, by restricting ourselves to a specific performance measure, we derive a new NFL result for a class of problems which is not closed under permutations. In the second part, we discuss properties of this set which are likely to be true for realistic search algorithms. We provide empirical support for this in [1].

References

[1]
Yossi Borenstein and Riccardo Poli. The no free lunch and realistic search algorithms. Technical report, University of Essex, 2006.
[2]
David Wolpert and William G. Macready. No free lunch theorems for optimization. IEEE Trans. Evolutionary Computation, 1(1):67--82, 1997.
[3]
C. Schumacher, M. D. Vose, and L. D. Whitley. The no free lunch and problem description length. In Lee Spector et al. editors, GECCO 2001. Morgan Kaufmann.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    GECCO '06: Proceedings of the 8th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
    July 2006
    2004 pages
    ISBN:1595931864
    DOI:10.1145/1143997
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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 08 July 2006

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    Author Tags

    1. genetic algorithms
    2. heuristics
    3. no free lunch
    4. theory

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    GECCO06
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    GECCO06: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
    July 8 - 12, 2006
    Washington, Seattle, USA

    Acceptance Rates

    GECCO '06 Paper Acceptance Rate 205 of 446 submissions, 46%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,669 of 4,410 submissions, 38%

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