Individual Sets

This section describes the concept of individual sets.

Individual Sets

For easier handling of collections of individuals individual sets have been defined. The appropriate interface can be found in org.evolvica.core.IIndividualSet. In general an individual set is much like a Java collection. A set allows insertion and removal of single individuals. The underlying data structure is hidden. So internally an individual set can be an array, a hash set or even a matrix. It is important that an individual set can be iterated by set iterators (specified by org.evolvica.core.ISetIterator. and converted to real arrays. All genetic operators rely on iterating individual sets. For this reason all operators work on all kinds of individual sets. Iterating a set is similiar like the iterator-technique in Java.