Criteria for well designed chromosome representation and genetic operators

This chapter postulates criteria for the proper choice of chromosome encoding and genetic operators. The criteria are given intuitively and exemplified. To formulate the criteria, a set of genotypes is presented as a metric space with the metric introduced by the mutation. Encoding is a mapping from the phe notype to the genotype space: the pruper transformation of metrics is a quality criterion for the encoding. Operator bias is defined with respect to the genotype metric.