Can HP-protein folding be solved with genetic algorithms? Maybe not

Jansen, Reitze; Horn, Ruben; van Eck, Okke; Version, Kristian; Thomson, Sarah L.; van den Berg, Daan

Abstract

Genetic algorithms might not be able to solve the HP-protein folding problem because creating random individuals for an initial population is very hard, if not impossible. The reason for this, is that the expected number of constraint violations increases with instance size when randomly sampling individuals, as we will show in an experiment. Thereby, the probability of randomly sampling a valid individual decreases exponentially with instance size. This immediately prohibits resampling, and repair mechanisms might also be non-applicable. Backtracking could generate a valid random individual, but it runs in exponential time, and is therefore also unsuitable. No wonder that previous approaches do not report how (often) random samples are created, and only address small instances. We contrast our findings with TSP, which is also NP-hard, but does not have these problems.

Citation

Jansen, R., Horn, R., van Eck, O., Version, K., Thomson, S. L., & van den Berg, D. (2023, November). Can HP-protein folding be solved with genetic algorithms? Maybe not. Presented at ECTA 2023 15th International Conference on Evolutionary Computation Theory and Applications, Rome, Italy

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: ECTA 2023 15th International Conference on Evolutionary Computation Theory and Applications
• Start Date: Nov 13, 2023
• End Date: Nov 15, 2023
• Acceptance Date: Sep 27, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023
• Deposit Date: Sep 28, 2023
• Publisher: Scitepress Digital Library
• Pages: 131-140
• Book Title: Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence
• ISBN: 978-989-758-674-3
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5220/0012248500003595
• Keywords: Protein Folding, Genetic Algorithms, Evolutionary Computing, Constraints, Constraint Hierarchy
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/3203199
• Related Public URLs: https://ecta.scitevents.org/