
An Introduction to Creative Evolutionary Systems
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individuals are often largely similar to old ones (inheritance), but with some dif-
ferences (variation), and there is some bias toward inheritance from "better" in-
dividuals (selection).
Selection, in particular, is both critical to the success of an EA (i.e., without
selection, there is no force to drive the population toward improving fitness) and
can be implemented in such an algorithm in several ways. Consider the real-
world process of selective cattle breeding, for example. We can implement selec-
tion either by making sure we only allow better cows ...