Genetic repair

approach to explain the possible increase of performance by recombination. Accordingly, the task of recombination is to extract the genetic information common to the selected individuals, as this information is likely responsible for fitness increase. A perfect recombination operator should additionally reduce those parts of the genome which are responsible for a decrease in fitness. This is, e.g., statistically realized by ES recombination operators in real-valued search spaces by (partially) averaging out the defective components.