Efficient Implementation of Fitness-Proportionate “Roulette” Selection

Question

I am currently writing a keyboard layout optimization algorithm in C (such as the one designed by Peter Klausler) and I want to implement a fitness-proportionate selection as described here (PDF Link):

With roulette selection you select members of the population based on a roullete wheel model. Make a pie chart, where the area of a member’s slice to the whole circle is the ratio of the members fitness to the total population. As you can see if a point on the circumfrence of the circle is picked at random those population members with higher fitness will have a higher probability of being picked. This ensures natural selection takes place.

The problem is, I don't see how to implement it efficiently. I've thought of two methods: one is unreliable, and the other is slow.

First, the slow one:

For a keyboard pool of length N, create an array of length N where each element of the array actually contains two elements, a minimum and a maximum value. Each keyboard has a corresponding minimum and maximum value, and the range is based on the fitness of the keyboard. For example, if keyboard zero has a fitness of 10, keyboard one has a fitness of 20, and keyboard two has a fitness of 25, it would look like this: Code:

array[0][0] = 0; // minimum
array[0][1] = 9; // maximum
array[1][0] = 10;
array[1][1] = 30;
array[2][0] = 31;
array[2][1] = 55;

(In this case a lower fitness is better, since it means less effort is required.)

Then generate a random number. For whichever range that number falls into, the corresponding keyboard is "killed" and replaced with the offspring of a different keyboard. Repeat this as many times as desired.

The problem with this is that it is very slow. It takes O(N^2) operations to finish.

Next the fast one:

First figure out what the lowest and highest fitnesses for the keyboards are. Then generate a random number between (lowest fitness) and (highest fitness) and kill all keyboards with a fitness higher than the generated number. This is efficient, but it's not guaranteed to only kill half the keyboards. It also has somewhat different mechanics from a "roulette wheel" selection, so it may not even be applicable.

So the question is, what is an efficient implementation?

There is a somewhat efficient algorithm on page 36 of this book (Link), but the problem is, it's only efficient if you do the roulette selection only one or a few times. Is there any efficient way to do many roulette selections in parallel?

Answer 1

For one thing, it sounds like you are talking about unfitness scores if you want to "kill off" your selection (which is likely to be a keyboard with high score).

I see no need to maintain two arrays. I think the simplest way is to maintain a single array of scores, which you then iterate through to make a choice:

/* These will need to be populated at the outset */
int scores[100];
int totalScore;

for (gen = 0; gen < nGenerations; ++gen) {
    /* Perform a selection and update */
    int r = rand() % totalScore;        /* HACK: using % introduces bias */
    int t = 0;
    for (i = 0; i < 100; ++i) {
        t += scores[i];
        if (r < t) {
            /* Bingo! */
            totalScore -= scores[i];
            keyboards[i] = generate_new_keyboard_somehow();
            scores[i] = score_keyboard(keyboards[i]);
            totalScore += scores[i];    /* Now totalScore is correct again */
        }
    }
}

Each selection/update takes O(n) time for n keyboards.