Last semester (my first at the University of Tennessee) I took an Independent Study (CS 593) course with Dr. Michael Vose. During that course, we tried to optimize several Genetic algorithm operators for crossover, and the traditional bit-flip mutation operator.

As a result for that course, a draft article tentatively called "An efficient implementation of crossover and mutation in binary coded GAs" was produced.

In this article, four crossover operators and one mutation are studied, and speed-ups of up to 4 times are registered. Also, a Chi-square statistical test is applied to the results to support correctness of the new implementations against the traditional ones.

The medullar part of this work lies in a versatile random number generator that allows for arbitrarily distributed pseudo-random numbers to be generated in only about 3 times the time that is required to generate an uniformly distributed random number.

The article is currently in final draft, and being checked by Dr. Vose.