Boris Mitavskiy

Jun He, Boris Mitavskiy, Yuren Zhou

Evolutionary algorithms are well suited for solving the knapsack problem. Some empirical studies claim that evolutionary algorithms can produce good solutions to the 0-1 knapsack problem. Nonetheless, few rigorous investigations address the quality of solutions that evolutionary algorithms may produce for the knapsack problem. The current paper focuses on a theoretical investigation of three types of (N+1) evolutionary algorithms that exploit bitwise mutation, truncation selection, plus different repair methods for the 0-1 knapsack problem. It assesses the solution quality in terms of the approximation ratio. Our work indicates that the solution produced by pure strategy and mixed strategy evolutionary algorithms is arbitrarily bad. Nevertheless, the evolutionary algorithm using helper objectives may produce 1/2-approximation solutions to the 0-1 knapsack problem.

Boris Mitavskiy, Elio Tuci, Chris Cannings et al.

The classical Geiringer theorem addresses the limiting frequency of occurrence of various alleles after repeated application of crossover. It has been adopted to the setting of evolutionary algorithms and, a lot more recently, reinforcement learning and Monte-Carlo tree search methodology to cope with a rather challenging question of action evaluation at the chance nodes. The theorem motivates novel dynamic parallel algorithms that are explicitly described in the current paper for the first time. The algorithms involve independent agents traversing a dynamically constructed directed graph that possibly has loops. A rather elegant and profound category-theoretic model of cognition in biological neural networks developed by a well-known French mathematician, professor Andree Ehresmann jointly with a neurosurgeon, Jan Paul Vanbremeersch over the last thirty years provides a hint at the connection between such algorithms and Hebbian learning.

Boris Mitavskiy, Jun He

A popular current research trend deals with expanding the Monte-Carlo tree search sampling methodologies to the environments with uncertainty and incomplete information. Recently a finite population version of Geiringer theorem with nonhomologous recombination has been adopted to the setting of Monte-Carlo tree search to cope with randomness and incomplete information by exploiting the entrinsic similarities within the state space of the problem. The only limitation of the new theorem is that the similarity relation was assumed to be an equivalence relation on the set of states. In the current paper we lift this "curtain of limitation" by allowing the similarity relation to be modeled in terms of an arbitrary set cover of the set of state-action pairs.

Boris Mitavskiy, Jun He

Hybrid and mixed strategy EAs have become rather popular for tackling various complex and NP-hard optimization problems. While empirical evidence suggests that such algorithms are successful in practice, rather little theoretical support for their success is available, not mentioning a solid mathematical foundation that would provide guidance towards an efficient design of this type of EAs. In the current paper we develop a rigorous mathematical framework that suggests such designs based on generalized schema theory, fitness levels and drift analysis. An example-application for tackling one of the classical NP-hard problems, the "single-machine scheduling problem" is presented.

Boris Mitavskiy, Jun He

Nowadays hybrid evolutionary algorithms, i.e, heuristic search algorithms combining several mutation operators some of which are meant to implement stochastically a well known technique designed for the specific problem in question while some others playing the role of random search, have become rather popular for tackling various NP-hard optimization problems. While empirical studies demonstrate that hybrid evolutionary algorithms are frequently successful at finding solutions having fitness sufficiently close to the optimal, many fewer articles address the computational complexity in a mathematically rigorous fashion. This paper is devoted to a mathematically motivated design and analysis of a parameterized family of evolutionary algorithms which provides a polynomial time approximation scheme for one of the well-known NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, namely the "single machine scheduling problem without precedence constraints". The authors hope that the techniques and ideas developed in this article may be applied in many other situations.