Reproduction Interface

This is an outline of the minimal interface that is expected to be present on reproduction objects. Each Population instance will create exactly one instance of the reproduction class in Population.__init__ regardless of the configuration or arguments provided to Population.__init__.

Class Methods

parse_config(cls, param_dict) - Takes a dictionary of configuration items, returns an object that will later be passed to the write_config method. This configuration object is considered to be opaque by the rest of the library.

write_config(cls, f, config) - Takes a file-like object and the configuration object created by parse_config. This method should write the configuration item definitions to the given file.

Initialization

__init__(self, config, reporters, stagnation) - Takes the reproduction configuration sub-object (as returned by this class’s parse_config method — for DefaultReproduction this is a DefaultClassConfig with fields like elitism, survival_threshold, min_species_size, etc.), a ReporterSet instance, and a stagnation object instance.

Warning

The config parameter passed to __init__ is the reproduction sub-config, not the top-level Config object. Note that the config argument passed to reproduce(self, config, species, pop_size, generation) IS the top-level Config — the same parameter name refers to different objects in __init__ and reproduce.

Other methods

create_new(self, genome_type, genome_config, num_genomes): - Create num_genomes new genomes of the given type using the given configuration.

reproduce(self, config, species, pop_size, generation): - Creates the population to be used in the next generation from the given configuration instance, SpeciesSet instance, desired size of the population, and current generation number. This method is called after all genomes have been evaluated and their fitness member assigned. This method should use the stagnation instance given to the initializer to remove species it deems to have stagnated.