Inheritance (genetic algorithm)

In genetic algorithms, inheritance is the ability of modeled objects to mate, mutate and propagate their problem solving genes to the next generation, in order to produce an evolved solution to a particular problem. The determination of which objects will be inherited from in each successive generation is determined by a fitness function.

This propagation of traits between generations is similar to the inheritance of traits between generations of biological organisms. Also, this process can be viewed as a form of reinforcement learning due to the fact that the evolution of the objects is driven by the passing of traits from successful objects, which can be viewed as a reward.