Binary Tournament Selection

Question

My understanding of a tournament selection is:

For a given tournament size, t , randomly select t individuals from the population and determine the winner of that tournament as the individual with the largest fitness function value.

My question is:

Is there a difference between 'Binary Tournament Selection' and 'Tournament Selection', or are they interchangeable terms?

Damnify

Answer 1

You have a value, lets call it k which determines of how many candidates you pick the best one for each parent you want to chose. This value is often 2 and in this special case we can also call it binary tournament selection. Tournament selection is just the broader term where k can be any number >= 2

Romo

Actually, I was puzzled with the first statement of your answer. what does "determines of" and "want to chose" mean? Here, is k the selected candidates from the last generation? Or is k is the size of the last generation? – Lillalillard

@Lillalillard Lets say your generation has 1000 individuals. You can now create 1000 new individuals for the next generation by having multiple tournaments of size 2 where you pick the better individual out of 2 randomly chosen as a parent for the next generation. Here k would be 2 and you'd run 2000 tournaments if you're having just 1 parent per individual – Romo