Introducing Elitist Black-Box Models: When Does Elitist Behavior Weaken the Performance of Evolutionary Algorithms?
Résumé
Black-box complexity theory provides lower bounds for the runtime of black-box optimizers like evolutionary algorithms and other search heuristics and serves as an inspiration for the design of new genetic algorithms. Several black-box models covering different classes of algorithms exist, each highlighting a different aspect of the algorithms under considerations. In this work we add to the existing black-box notions a new elitist black-box model, in which algorithms are required to base all decisions solely on (the relative performance of) a fixed number of the best search points sampled so far. Our elitist model thus combines features of the ranking-based and the memoryrestricted black-box models with an enforced usage of truncation selection.