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A Study of Altruism by Genetic Algorithm

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Advances in Soft Computing

Abstract

Altruism belongs to “social attributes” of individuals in a population. Model of “kinship” altruism is studied, where an altruistic individual is more likely to help its relative.

In our model simulations by a modified genetic algorithm the chromosomes were defined by a presence or an absence of an altruistic disposition, affiliation to a group (kinship relation), and a fitness, initially random. No objective function is used, new fitness is created in a reproduction process from an arithmetic mean of parental fitness modified by a random number with normal distribution.

Altruistic process increases fitness of a randomly chosen chromosome-recipient, and decreases fitness of a randomly chosen chromosome with an altruistic allele-donor. The increase/decrease is unproportional to an absolute value of the difference of their affiliated groups. Results suggest, that an altruistic behavior in the initial stage was created by a random genetic drift in a subgroup and initial division of a population into subgroups is crucial for its evolutionary (meta)stability.

The presented simulation can be useful for evolutionary biology as well as for a modification of genetic algorithms (e.g. in artificial agents) towards natural systems.

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© 1999 Springer-Verlag London Limited

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Pospíchal, J., Kvasnička, V. (1999). A Study of Altruism by Genetic Algorithm. In: Roy, R., Furuhashi, T., Chawdhry, P.K. (eds) Advances in Soft Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0819-1_38

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0819-1_38

  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-85233-062-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-0819-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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