Cross-fertilization between evolutionary computation and DNA-based computing

The potential for cross-fertilization between the fields of DNA based computing and evolutionary computation is outlined both from a principal point of view and by means of an experimental investigation concerning the NP-hard maximum clique problem. A simple evolutionary approach to maximum clique is introduced and the hypothesis is tested whether the increase in population size possible by realizing evolutionary computation with DNA yields the expected improvement in solution quality. Results obtained for a limited range of population sizes up to 10⁴ indicate that the hypothesis holds for about two-third of the investigated problem instances (which were taken from the DIMACS library)