Performance comparison of two evolutionary schemes

The performance of a deterministic algorithm is judged by its computational complexity. But an evolutionary algorithm being probabilistic in nature, its convergence has some probability associated with it. In the present paper, we try to locate the parameters that control the performance of an evolutionary algorithm. In this formulation, we make some assumptions, under which the performance comparison is possible. Moreover we propose a notion of characteristic polynomial which gives a measure of the performance of an evolutionary scheme. The area under the curve of the characteristic polynomial over the range 0 to 1 is equivalently shown to represent the performance criterion.