Creating a Class Schedule

Introduction

Each of these steps, selection, crossover, and mutation, accepts a collection of chromosomes and transforms the collection in some way to produce a new collection of chromosomes. At this point, we can divide your population into three categories: parents, children, and leftovers.

We have three groups of chromosomes from which to choose, and we need to combine them in such a way that your new population retains the strengths of old chromosomes while integrating the strengths of new chromosomes. Ideally, good selection, crossover, and mutation strategies would effectively capture the strongest traits of older generations and combine them to make stronger generations; however, the process of combining the products of all of these steps is crucial to the success of evolution.

The process of combining the byproducts of selection, crossover, and mutation into a new population is known as reinsertion or replacement. Both of these terms essentially have the same meaning; however, we’ll learn about some of the minute differences later on in this chapter.

For the remainder of this chapter, we’ll explore several approaches to reinsertion and ...