Abstract
This paper has three aims. Firstly, to clarify the poorly understood No Free Lunch Theorem (NFL) which states all search algorithms perform equally. Secondly, search algorithms are often applied to program induction and it is suggested that NFL does not hold due to the universal nature of the mapping between program space and functionality space. Finally, NFL and combinatorial problems are examined. When evaluating a candidate solution, it can be discarded without being fully examined. A stronger version of NFL is established for this class of problems where the goal is to minimize a quantity.
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Woodward, J.R., Neil, J.R. (2003). No Free Lunch, Program Induction and Combinatorial Problems. In: Ryan, C., Soule, T., Keijzer, M., Tsang, E., Poli, R., Costa, E. (eds) Genetic Programming. EuroGP 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2610. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36599-0_45
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36599-0_45
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