Isolating the benefits of respect

The three mechanisms of crossover are transmission, assortment, and respect. Of these three mechanisms, assortment (i.e. recombination) is traditionally viewed as the primary feature and key advantage of crossover. However, respect (the preservation of common components) is also a feature that is unique to multi-parent operators like crossover - it takes two (or more) parents to have/identify common components. The effects of respect are isolated from all other aspects of genetic algorithms by using a parallel implementation of simulated annealing. In this implementation, the preservation of common components is used to focus the search process and this focus has improved the performance of simulated annealing on the TSP. Since only the mechanism of respect is transferred from genetic algorithms to simulated annealing, these experiments isolate and demonstrate the benefits of respect.