Shake – Regicide: A New Heuristic for the Diversity Control of Evolutionary Algorithms

Evolutionary algorithms have been very successful at solving global optimization problems. Two competing goals govern the performance of evolutionary algorithms: exploration and exploitation. This paper proposes a new heuristic to keep population diversity: the shake and the regicide. The shake heuristic improves the exploration by perturbing the whole population. The regicide heuristic (kill the leader) reduces the risk of being, early, trapped by a local minimum. Experiments demonstrate that the Shake-Regicide heuristic improves significantly the precision of the results (in about 3 orders of magnitude) of standard differential evolution, genetic algorithm and evolution strategy.