Evolution Made Visible: Genetic Algorithms in an Interactive Laboratory

Teaching book for undergraduate students who are new to genetic algorithms. Concepts are presented through explanations, reproducible examples, activities with interactive tools, and exercises with solutions. It covers the algorithm’s cycle, representations, initialization and evaluation, selection, crossover, mutation, replacement and stopping criteria, parameters and randomness, and a complete application to the traveling salesman problem. Sections are organized into Basic, Advanced, and Further reading levels. The book is part of the Genetic Algorithms Lab.

This is the English translation of the Spanish edition 1.0, Evolución a la vista. Algoritmos genéticos en un laboratorio interactivo (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23835733), which remains the original reference text. The translation was produced with AI assistants (Codex, chapters 1–5; Claude, chapters 6–11) and checked against the source; the authors then reviewed the English text manually, chapter by chapter, in November 2026.

Version 1.1 includes the PDF (246 pages, with the solutions at the end of each chapter), the HTML version for offline reading (index.html inside the ZIP; the lab’s tools require a connection), and the Quarto sources with the PDF generator, from the repository tag v1.1-en (commit 18a0df0). New in version 1.1: for reading on paper, the PDF has a QR code and a key next to each link to an application and next to the tools of each chapter; the code opens the tool, in the state of the example, through the book’s website. The text of the chapters is unchanged.

Text, original figures, and exercises: CC BY 4.0; code: MIT. Third-party components and external tools retain their own authorship and licenses.