Divide-and-Evolve : the Marriage of Descartes and Darwin

DAEX, the concrete implementation of the Divide-andEvolve paradigm, is a domain-independent satisficing planning system based on Evolutionary Computation. The basic principle is to carry out a Divide-and-Conquer strategy driven by an evolutionary algorithm. The key components of DAEX are a state-based decomposition principle, an evolutionary algorithm to drive the optimization process, and an embedded planner X to solve the sub-problems. The release that has been submitted to the competition is DAEYAHSP, the instantiation of DAEX with the heuristic forward search YAHSP planner. The marriage of DAE and YAHSP matches a clean role separation: YAHSP gets a few tries to find a solution quickly whereas DAE controls the optimization process.