Provably convergent inhomogeneous genetic annealing algorithm

We define genetic annealing as simulated annealing applied to a population of several solutions when candidates are generated from more than one (parent) solution at a time. We show that such genetic annealing algorithms can inherit the convergence properties of simulated annealing. We present two examples, one that generates each candidate by crossing pairs of parents and a second that generates each candidate from the entire population. We experimentally apply these two extreme versions of genetic annealing to a problem in vector quantization.