The GENIE is out! (Who needs fitness to evolve?)

"Survival of the fittest" is often seen as the driving force behind adaptation and evolution. For sure, all evolutionary algorithms use fitness based selection. However, it is not necessary to know where you are, to know where you are going. Similarly, it is not necessary to know the fitness of a solution, to find a better solution. The GENIE algorithm uses random parent selection and a non-elitist generational replacement scheme. Experiments on a non-trivial instance of the Traveling Salesman Problem show that heuristic operators in GENIE can converge to the optimal solution without evaluating fitness.