HTML5 Genetic Cars
Maybe someone more versed in the state-of-the-art can help me: has the concept of "speciation" ever been applied to genetic algorithms?<p>In my instance, there are two predominant "types" of cars that are doing approximately equally well--the "rhinoboat" and the "assdragger".  But when these two solutions are combined in the crossover, I think they make an offspring that is terrible.<p>If the algorithm would mate only the rhinoboats with rhinoboats and assdraggers with assdraggers, I'm convinced we'd end up with some superrhinoboats and superassdraggers, but instead I just get an unhappy compromise.<p>Maybe make "similarity to self" one of the genotype parameters.  A high rating here would mean the phenotype would have a bias against being combined with dissimilar creatures.  This allows the propensity towards speciation to develop evolutionarily, too.