Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Evolutionary Computation

Publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press

Publication Date

2009

Volume

17

Issue

1

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

Abstract

Since it’s inception, the “No Free Lunch theorem” has concerned the application of symmetry results rather than the symmetries themselves. In our view, the conflation of result and application obscures the simplicity, generality, and power of the symmetries involved. This paper separates result from application, focusing on and clarifying the nature of underlying symmetries. The result is a general set-theoretic version of NFL which speaks to symmetries when arbitrary domains and co-domains are involved. Although our framework is deterministic, we note situations where our deterministic set-theoretic results speak nevertheless to stochastic algorithms.

Keywords

Black Box Search, No Free Lunch

DOI

10.1162/evco.2009.17.1.117

Comments

Reinterpreting No Free Lunch by Jon E. Rowe, M. D. Vose, Alden H. Wright. Evolutionary Computation 17 (1) 2009, 117-129. View original published article at 10.1162/evco.2009.17.1.117.

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