GAs: What Are They?

Abstract

There is a large class of interesting problems for which no reasonably fast algorithms have been developed. Many of these problems are optimization problems that arise frequently in applications. Given such a hard optimization problem it is often possible to find an efficient algorithm whose solution is approximately optimal. For some hard optimization problems we can use probabilistic algorithms as well — these algorithms do not guarantee the optimum value, but by randomly choosing sufficiently many ``witnesses'' the probability of error may be made as small as we like.