216 Chapter 8 GenetiC alGorithms
by John Holland (1975) at the University of Michigan. The basic objective
of his work was to understand the adaptive processes of natural systems
and hence, to design artificial systems software that retains the robustness of
natural systems.
In one way, genetic algorithms are adaptive heuristic search algorithms
based on the evolutionary ideas of natural selection (Obitko, 1998). The
appeal of genetic algorithms comes from their simplicity and elegance as
robust search algorithms. These are powerful tools to rapidly discover appro-
priate solutions for difficult high-dimensional problems. Genetic algorithms
are useful and efficient when:
The search space is large, complex, or poorly ...