  In evolutionary algorithms, the fitness of a population increases with time
by mutating and recombining individuals and by a biased selection of more fit
individuals. The right selection pressure is critical in ensuring sufficient
optimization progress on the one hand and in preserving genetic diversity to be
able to escape from local optima on the other hand. Motivated by a universal
similarity relation on the individuals, we propose a new selection scheme,
which is uniform in the fitness values. It generates selection pressure toward
sparsely populated fitness regions, not necessarily toward higher fitness, as
is the case for all other selection schemes. We show analytically on a simple
example that the new selection scheme can be much more effective than standard
selection schemes. We also propose a new deletion scheme which achieves a
similar result via deletion and show how such a scheme preserves genetic
diversity more effectively than standard approaches. We compare the performance
of the new schemes to tournament selection and random deletion on an artificial
deceptive problem and a range of NP-hard problems: traveling salesman, set
covering and satisfiability.

Neural and Evolutionary Computing;Machine Learning