Discovery of maximal distance codes using genetic algorithms

An application of genetic algorithms to the problem of discovering communication codes with properties useful for error corrections is described. Search spaces for these codes are so large as to rule out any exhaustive search strategy. Coding theory provides a rich and interesting domain for genetic algorithms. There are some coding problems about which a lot is known and good codes can be generated systematically. On the other hand, there are problem areas where little can be said about the characteristics of the codes in advance. Genetic algorithms have been advocated for these kinds of problems where domain knowledge is either limited or hard to represent and formalize. The authors describe some initial experiments on the use of genetic algorithms to discover maximal distance codes, and discuss the potential advantage of genetic algorithms in this problem domain