Unearthing a Fossil from the History of Evolutionary Computation

All of science relies on past experimentation and hypotheses. Unfortunately, the science of evolutionary computation is hampered by a general lack of awareness of many early efforts in the field. This paper offers a review of one such contribution from 1967 which employed self-adaptation, co-evolution, and assessed the utility of recombination in various settings. The conclusions, reconfirmed in recent literature, indicate that recombination (uniform or one-point crossover) is best applied in non-epistatic settings. Theoretical analysis supported the experimental findings and now raises questions concerning common applications of schema theory to describe the behavior of evolutionary algorithms.