Self-adaptation

in ES/EP (in the stronger sense) a standard method to realize self-adaptive behavior. Self-adaptation is achieved through the evolution of a secondary set of parameters, the so-called (endogenous) strategy parameters, which parameterize specific statistical properties of the variation operators (e.g. mutation strength, usually the standard deviation or covariance matrix of the mutation operators). Each individual contains its own set of strategy parameters, which is selected together with the set of object parameters. The mutation operators first change the strategy parameters which in turn determine the mutation of the object parameters.