The Royal Road Functions: Description, Intent and Experimentation

This paper describes an analysis of a set of experiments on the Royal Road functions, aimed at developing a GA that was robust for a set of such functions. The Royal Road functions were designed to be easy for Genetic Algorithms to solve and it was expected that other techniques would have difficulty in finding good solutions. However, it is discovered that a simple thresholding algorithm was able to produce comparable results on the basic Royal Road function and remained robust when applied to variations of the function. The GA required modification to compete on some variations and suffered severe performance deterioration on others.