Genetic Algorithm Viewer : Demonstration of a Genetic Algorithm

Introduction to Genetic Algorithms. Physics, Biology, Economy or Sociology often have to deal with the classical problem of optimization. Economy particularly has become specialist of that field1. Generally speaking, a large part of mathematical development during the XVIIIth century dealt with that topic (remember those always repeated problems where you had to obtain the derivative of a function to find its extremes). Purely analytical methods widely proved their efficiency. They nevertheless suffer from a insurmountable weakness : Reality rarely obeys to those wonderful differentiable functions your professors used to show you2. Other methods, combining mathematical analysis and random search have appeared. Imagine you scatter small robots in a Mountainous landscape. Those robots can follow the steepest path they found. When a robot reaches a peak, it claims that it has found the optimum. This method is very efficient, but there's no proof that the optimum has been found, each robot can be blocked in a local optimum. This type of method only works with reduced search spaces. What could be the link between optimization methods and artificial life ?