Abstract

We introduce fitnessless coevolution (FC), a novel method of comparative one-population coevolution. FC plays games between individuals to settle tournaments in the selection phase and skips the typical phase of evaluation. The selection operator applies a single-elimination tournament to a randomly drawn group of individuals, and the winner of the final round becomes the result of selection. Therefore, FC does not involve explicit fitness measure. We prove that, under a condition of transitivity of the payoff matrix, the dynamics of FC is identical to that of the traditional evolutionary algorithm. The experimental results, obtained on a diversified group of problems, demonstrate that FC is able to produce solutions that are equally good or better than solutions obtained using fitness-based one-population coevolution with different selection methods.

Citations