Boosting my GA with Neural Networks and/or Reinforcement Learning

As noted in some comments, your question indeed involves a large set of background knowledge and topics that hardly can be eloquently covered on stackoverflow. However, what we can try here is suggest approaches to get around your problem.

First of all: what does your GA do? I see a set of binary values; what are they? I see them as either:

• bad: a sequence of 'turn right' and 'turn left' instructions. Why is this bad? Because you're basically doing a random, brute-force attempt at solving your problem. You're not evolving a genotype: you're refining random guesses.
• better: every gene (location in the genome) represents a feature that will be expressed in the phenotype. There should not be a 1-to-1 mapping between genome and phenotype!

Let me give you an example: in our brain there are 10^13ish neurons. But we have only around 10^9 genes (yes, it's not an exact value, bear with me for a second). What does this tell us? That our genotype does not encode every neuron. Our genome encodes the proteins that will then go and make the components of our body.

Hence, evolution works on the genotype directly by selecting features of the phenotype. If I were to have 6 fingers on each hand and if that would made me a better programmer, making me have more kids because I'm more successful in life, well, my genotype would then be selected by evolution because it contains the capability to give me a more fit body (yes, there is a pun there, given the average geekiness-to-reproducibily ratio of most people around here).

Now, think about your GA: what is that you are trying to accomplish? Are you sure that evolving rules would help? In other words -- how would you perform in a maze? What is the most successful thing that can help you: having a different body, or having a memory of the right path to get out? Perhaps you might want to reconsider your genotype and have it encode memorization abilities. Maybe encode in the genotype how much data can be stored, and how fast can your agents access it -- then measure fitness in terms of how fast they get out of the maze. Another (weaker) approach could be to encode the rules that your agent uses to decide where to go. The take-home message is, encode features that, once expressed, can be selected by fitness.

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Now, to the neural network issue. One thing to remember is that NNs are filters. They receive an input. perform operations on it, and return an output. What is this output? Maybe you just need to discriminate a true/false condition; for example, once you feed a maze map to a NN, it can tell you if you can get out from the maze or not. How would you do such a thing? You will need to encode the data properly.

This is the key point about NNs: your input data must be encoded properly. Usually people normalize it, maybe scale it, perhaps you can apply a sigma function to it to avoid values that are too large or too small; those are details that deal with error measures and performance. What you need to understand now is what a NN is, and what you cannot use it for.

To your problem now. You mentioned you want to use NNs as well: what about,

• using a neural network to guide the agent, and
• using a genetic algorithm to evolve the neural network parameters?

Rephrased like so:

• let's suppose you have a robot: your NN is controlling the left and right wheel, and as input it receives the distance of the next wall and how much it has traveled so far (it's just an example)
• you start by generating a random genotype
• make the genotype into a phenotype: the first gene is the network sensitivity; the second gene encodes the learning ratio; the third gene.. so on and so forth
• now that you have a neural network, run the simulation
• see how it performs
• generate a second random genotype, evolve second NN
• see how this second individual performs
• get the best individual, then either mutate its genotype or recombinate it with the loser
• repeat

there is an excellent reading on the matter here: Inman Harvey Microbial GA.

I hope I did you some insight on such issues. NNs and GA are no silver bullet to solve all problems. In some they can do very much, in others they are just the wrong tool. It's (still!) up to us to get the best one, and to do so we must understand them well.

Have fun in it! It's great to know such things, makes everyday life a bit more entertaining :)