NodEO, a multi-paradigm distributed evolutionary algorithm platform in JavaScript

Abstract

After more than fifteen years, JavaScript has finally risen as a popular language for implementing all kind of applications, from server-based to rich internet applications. The fact that it is implemented in the browser and in server-side tools makes it interesting for designing evolutionary algorithm frameworks that encompass both tiers, but besides, they allow a change in paradigm that goes beyond the canonical evolutionary algorithm. In this paper we will experiment with different architectures, client-server and peer to peer to assess which ones offer most advantages in terms of performance, scalability and ease of use for the computer scientist. All implementations have been released as open source, and besides showing that the concept of working with evolutionary algorithms in JavaScript can be done efficiently, we prove that a master-slave parallel architecture offers the best combination of time and algorithmic improvements in a parallel evolutionary algorithm that leverages JavaScript implementation features.