Phrase matcher
Command lineGenitic algorithmsStrings
This is the simplest genetic algorithm project and really serves as a starter
project to make sure you have the basic mechanics working before you move on
to more complicated uses of genetic algorithms.
A genetic algorithm is a form of computation that takes inspiration from biological evolution. Rather than computing a particular result directly, a genetic algorithm works by randomly generating many possible solutions and then evaluating them and recombining the best solutions to make new solutions, crossing and mutating them in a process analogous to the way parents' DNA is crossed and mutated when making a baby.
Genetic algorithms only work if we have some way to measure the fitness of various solutions and also to combine those solutions to produce new solutions and are most applicable when the space of potential solutions is very large and there are no efficient algorithms for finding an optimal solution.
In this project you will tackle a problem that has a large solution space but which has a trivial solution, namely: given a string, can we evolve our way to the same string. Suppose our string is "To be, or not to be, that is the question." To find that string with a genetic algorithm we'd generate tens of thousands of random strings, rank them all by how close they are to the target string, combine the ones that are closest to the desired string to make new strings, and iterate until eventually we find a string with perfect fitness, i.e. that exactly matches the target.
To see how big the solution space is, consider that if we assume an alphabet of a-z in both upper and lower case plus a few punctuation characters, there are over 5.5e73 strings of the same length as the phrase, "To be, or not to be, that is the question." That is a big number. If we could check a billion possibilities per second it would take us a time more than one hundred twenty-eight quattuordecillion (1.28e47) times longer than the current age of the universe to check all the possible strings.