A fitness function is a particular type of objective function that is used to summarise, as a single figure of merit, how close a given design solution is to achieving the set aims.
In particular, in the fields of genetic programming and genetic algorithms, each design solution is commonly represented as a string of numbers (referred to as a chromosome). After each round of testing, or simulation, the idea is to delete the ‘n’ worst design solutions, and to breed ‘n’ new ones from the best design solutions. Each design solution, therefore, needs to be awarded a figure of merit, to indicate how close it came to meeting the overall specification, and this is generated by applying the fitness function to the test, or simulation, results obtained from that solution.
The reason that genetic algorithms cannot be considered to be a lazy way of performing design work is precisely because of the effort involved in designing a workable fitness function. Even though it is no longer the human designer, but the computer, that comes up with the final design, it is the human designer who has to design the fitness function. If this is designed badly, the algorithm will either converge on an inappropriate solution, or will have difficulty converging at all.
Moreover, the fitness function must not only correlate closely with the designer’s goal, it must also be computed quickly. Speed of execution is very important, as a typical genetic algorithm must be iterated many times in order to produce a usable result for a non-trivial problem.
Fitness approximation may be appropriate, especially in the following cases:
Fitness computation time of a single solution is extremely high
Precise model for fitness computation is missing
The fitness function is uncertain or noisy.
Two main classes of fitness functions exist: one where the fitness function does not change, as in optimizing a fixed function or testing with a fixed set of test cases; and one where the fitness function is mutable, as in niche differentiation or co-evolving the set of test cases.
Another way of looking at fitness functions is in terms of a fitness landscape, which shows the fitness for each possible chromosome.
Definition of the fitness function is not straightforward in many cases and often is performed iteratively if the fittest solutions produced by GA are not what is desired. In some cases, it is very hard or impossible to come up even with a guess of what fitness function definition might be. Interactive genetic algorithms address this difficulty by outsourcing evaluation to external agents (normally humans).
