Whats an Evolution Strategy (ES)?
In 1963 two students at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) met and were soon to collaborate on experiments which used the wind tunnel of the Institute of Flow Engineering. During the search for the optimal shapes of bodies in a flow, which was then a matter of laborious intuitive experimentation, the idea was conceived of proceeding strategically. However, attempts with the coordinate and simple gradient strategies (cf Q5) were unsuccessful. Then one of the students, Ingo Rechenberg, now Professor of Bionics and Evolutionary Engineering, hit upon the idea of trying random changes in the parameters defining the shape, following the example of natural MUTATIONs. The EVOLUTION STRATEGY was born. A third student, Peter Bienert, joined them and started the construction of an automatic experimenter, which would work according to the simple rules of mutation and SELECTION. The second student, Hans-Paul Schwefel, set about testing the efficiency of the new methods with the help of a Zuse
