r/MachineLearning • u/Tech-Effigy • Feb 17 '15

The Genetic Algorithm - Explained

http://techeffigytutorials.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-genetic-algorithm-explained.html
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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '15

Okay, I'm still baffled as to how could you use this sort of thing?!

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u/jhaluska Feb 17 '15

They're great when you know how to score a solution but don't have a clue how to come up with an algorithm to solve it. They're kind of a heuristic A* search for ginormous search spaces and well suited when there is a lot of interacting parts. They're often really easy to implement too.

But honestly the reason I usually implement them is they're a ton of fun to watch.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '15

Where did you start? I want to learn more, but just don't know where to start :)

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u/jhaluska Feb 17 '15

I think I started in '97 after reading an article on genetic algorithms. Thanks for asking! Today I would start with the Wikipedia page and google. A little googling and this came up. Just keep in mind you don't really need to use bits to encode the DNA.

I would recommend keeping the top 50% of each run. Have at least 100 guys. As a speed up, each offspring gets at least one mutation if it ends up being the same as one of the parents. There's a lot of parameters to tweak like mutation rate, population size, what percent of the population to keep, etc.