Techreport,
The effects of crossover and mutation operators on variable length linear structures.
CSRP-01-7. University of Birmingham, School of Computer Science, (January 2001)
Abstract
In the search space of variable length strings, it is
possible to define crossover and mutation operators
that are equivalent to those used in genetic
programming on tree structures. We study the effects of
these operators on the lengths of strings within a
population. It is shown that the distributions by which
different string lengths are sampled are strongly
biased. To investigate these biases, the effects of
repeated application of the operators (without regard
for fitness) is considered, and in some cases the
fixed-point distributions are found.
