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Ranking-Based Black-Box Complexity

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Abstract

Randomized search heuristics such as evolutionary algorithms, simulated annealing, and ant colony optimization are a broadly used class of general-purpose algorithms. Analyzing them via classical methods of theoretical computer science is a growing field. While several strong runtime analysis results have appeared in the last 20 years, a powerful complexity theory for such algorithms is yet to be developed. We enrich the existing notions of black-box complexity by the additional restriction that not the actual objective values, but only the relative quality of the previously evaluated solutions may be taken into account by the black-box algorithm. Many randomized search heuristics belong to this class of algorithms.

We show that the new ranking-based model can give more realistic complexity estimates. The class of all binary-value functions has a black-box complexity of O(logn) in the previous black-box models, but has a ranking-based complexity of Θ(n).

On the other hand, for the class of all OneMax functions, we present a ranking-based black-box algorithm that has a runtime of Θ(n/logn), which shows that the OneMax problem does not become harder with the additional ranking-basedness restriction.

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Notes

  1. That is, {g(Om z (x 1)),…,g(Om z (x s ))}∩([g(Om z (x i )),g(Om z (y))]∪[g(Om z (y)),g(Om z (x i ))])={g(Om z (x i )),g(Om z (y))}.

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Acknowledgements

Carola Winzen is a recipient of the Google Europe Fellowship in Randomized Algorithms. This work is supported in part by this Google Fellowship.

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  1. Max Planck Institute for Informatics, 66123, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Benjamin Doerr & Carola Winzen

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  1. Benjamin Doerr
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  2. Carola Winzen
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Correspondence to Carola Winzen.

Additional information

A preliminary version of the results appeared in [7].

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Doerr, B., Winzen, C. Ranking-Based Black-Box Complexity. Algorithmica 68, 571–609 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-012-9684-9

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