The APS Environment

Choosing the Population Size
 
To choose the population size, in the Settings Panel -> General Settings enter the Number of Chromosomes. The default in APS 3.0 is 50-200, which is a good compromise to create models for virtually all problems.

Learning and adaptation occur in evolutionary algorithms because populations of individuals (models) adapt with time. Obviously, the larger the population the faster adaptation. But there’s a caveat here: in a computer, the higher the number of models the longer it takes to process them. So one must choose a population size that enables an efficient adaptation in record time. In Gene Expression Programming, the learning algorithm used by APS, this can be accomplished well enough with populations of 30-200 individuals provided that the right degree of genetic modification is being introduced in the evolving populations. How this is accomplished is explained in the next section.

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