Simple explanation of the no-free-lunch theorem and its implications

Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications

Volumn 115, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 549-570

  Ho, Y C ^a   Pepyne, D L ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

complexity; decision making; impossibility theorem; learning; No free lunch theorem; optimization; representation and encoding; robustness; search; sensitivity; strategy selection

Indexed keywords

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE; SIGNAL ENCODING;

COMPLEXITY; DECISIONS MAKINGS; ENCODINGS; IMPOSSIBILITY THEOREM; LEARNING; NO FREE LUNCH THEOREM; OPTIMISATIONS; REPRESENTATION AND ENCODING; ROBUSTNESS; SEARCH; SENSITIVITY; STRATEGY SELECTION;

DECISION MAKING;

EID: 0036437286     PISSN: 00223239     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1021251113462     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. CULBERSON, J. C., On the Futility of Blind Search, Technical Report TR 96-18, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 1996.
2. CULBERSON, J. C., On the Futility of Blind Search: An Algorithmic View of 'No Free Lunch', Evolutionary Computation, Vol. 6, pp. 109-127, 1998.
3. DUDA, R. O., HART, P. E., and STORK, D. G., Pattern Classification, 2nd Edition, John Wiley and Sons, New York, NY, 2001.
4. HO, Y. C., The No-Free-Lunch Theorem and the Human Machine Interface, IEEE Control Systems Magazine, Vol. 19, pp. 88-90, 1999.
5. KOPPEN, M., WOLPERT, D. H., and MACREADY, W. G., Remarks on a Recent Paper on the No-Free-Lunch Theorems, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Vol. 5, pp. 295-296, 2001.
6. RADCLIFF, N.J., and SURRY, P. D., Fundamental Limitations on Search Algorithms: Evolutionary Computing in Perspective, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Verlag, New York, NY, Vol. 1000, pp. 275-291, 1995.
7. SHARPE, O., Beyond NFL: A Few Tentative Steps (available online at http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/olivers/).
8. SHARPE, O., Continuing Beyond NFL: Dissecting Real World Problems (available online at http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/olivers/).
9. WOLPERT, D. H., and MACREADY, W. G., No-Free-Lunch Theorems for Optimization, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Vol. 1, pp. 67-82, 1997.
10. WOLPERT, D. H., and MACREADY, W. G., No-Free-Lunch Theorems for Search, Technical Report SFI-TR-95-02-010, Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1995.
11. HO, Y. C., An Explanation of Ordinal Optimization: Soft Computing for Hard Problems, Information Sciences, Vol. 113, pp. 169-192, 1999.
12. LIN, X. C., A New Framework for Discrete Stochastic Optimization, Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University, 2000.
13. DAI, L., Convergence Properties of Ordinal Comparisons in the Simulation of DEDS, Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Vol. 91, pp. 363-388, 1996.
14. DU, D. Z and KO, K. I., Theory of Computational Complexity, Wiley-Interscience, New York, NY, 2000.