A New Approach to Characterising Optimisation Problems Using Programmatic Representation and Complexity Measures
Characterising optimisation problem instances is a fundamental part of understanding the behaviour and performance of different algorithms as well as providing information for algorithm selection and configuration. In this paper we propose a novel approach to problem characterisation based on the representation of instances when implemented as a program. The intuition is that the complexity of the code required to express an objective function should relate to the complexity of the search landscape. We identify the Halstead volume as a measure of code complexity, which can be seen as a simplified version of the entropy of the program. Given a code implementation of the objective function,...
| Authors | Marcus Gallagher, Katherine M. Malan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.NE |
| Published | 9 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 August 2026 |
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