Human-based evolutionary computation

Human-based evolutionary computation (HBEC) is a set of evolutionary computation techniques that rely on human innovation. Human-based evolutionary computation techniques can be classified into three more specific classes analogous to ones in evolutionary computation. There are three basic types of innovation: initialization, mutation, and recombination. Here is a table illustrating which type of human innovation are supported in different classes of HBEC:

	Initialization	Mutation	Recombination
Human-based global search	X
Human-based evolution strategy	X	X
Human-based genetic algorithm	X	X	X

All these three classes also have to implement selection, performed either by humans or by computers.

Examples

Wikipedia software is the best illustration of working human-based evolution strategy in this context and maybe generally. Its initialization operator is the page creation. Its mutation operator is the incremental page edit. Wiki selection operator is less salient. It is provided by revision history and ability to select between the previous versions via revert operation. If the page is vandalised and no longer a good fit to its title, a reader can easily go to the revision history and select one of the previos revisions that fits best (hopefully, the previous one). This selection feature is very crucial to the success of such collaborative projects as Wikipedia.

An interesting fact is that wiki software was created in 1995, but it took at least another 6 years for large wiki-based collaborative projects to appear. Why did it take so long? One explanation to this fact is that the original wiki software was lacking selection operation and hence it couldn't effectively support content evolution. The addition of revision history and emergence of large wiki-supported communities coincide in time. From evolutionary computation point of view this is obvious: without selection operation the content would undergo a genetic drift and was quite useless. With selection operation, utility of the content have a tendency to improve over time, and that is what happens on a large scale in Wikipedia.