Machine Learning, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10

Evolutionary Learning

In this chapter we are going to start by treating evolution the same way that we treated neuroscience earlier in the book—by cherry-picking a few useful concepts, and then filling in the gaps with computer science in order to make an effective learning method. To see why this might be interesting, you need to view evolution as a search problem. We don’t generally think of it in this way, but animals are competing with each other in all kinds of ways—for example, eating each other—which encourages them to try to find camouflage colours, become toxic to certain predators, etc.

Evolution works on a population through an imaginary fitness landscape, which has an implicit bias towards animals that are ‘fitter’, i.e., ...