ec

Class Breeder

java.lang.Object

ec.Breeder

All Implemented Interfaces:

Setup, Singleton, Serializable

Direct Known Subclasses:

DEBreeder, MuCommaLambdaBreeder, PSOBreeder, SimpleBreeder

public abstract class Breeder
extends Object
implements Singleton

A Breeder is a singleton object which is responsible for the breeding process during the course of an evolutionary run. Only one Breeder is created in a run, and is stored in the EvolutionState object.

Breeders typically do their work by applying a Species' BreedingPipelines on subpopulations of that species to produce new individuals for those subpopulations.

Breeders may be multithreaded. The number of threads they may spawn (excepting a parent "gathering" thread) is governed by the EvolutionState's breedthreads value.

Be careful about spawning threads -- this system has no few synchronized methods for efficiency's sake, so you must either divvy up breeding in a thread-safe fashion and assume that all individuals in the current population are read-only (which you may assume for a generational breeder which needs to return a whole new population each generation), or otherwise you must obtain the appropriate locks on individuals in the population and other objects as necessary.

Version:

1.0

Author:

Sean Luke

See Also:

Serialized Form

Constructor Summary

Constructors

Constructor and Description
Breeder()

Method Summary

Methods

Modifier and Type	Method and Description
abstract Population	breedPopulation(EvolutionState state) Breeds state.population, returning a new population.

Methods inherited from class java.lang.Object

clone, equals, finalize, getClass, hashCode, notify, notifyAll, toString, wait, wait, wait

Methods inherited from interface ec.Setup

setup

Constructor Detail

Breeder

public Breeder()

Method Detail

breedPopulation

public abstract Population breedPopulation(EvolutionState state)

Breeds state.population, returning a new population. In general, state.population should not be modified.