Get Clarity on Differential Evolution: A Simple Explanation

[swartzism]

I am trying to write a differential evolution in FORTRAN, but I am a bit confused by the concept. I've read through Storn and Price's explanation of the concept, but I'm still not getting it. Can anyone offer a dumb-ed down version of what exactly a differential evolution is?

 

[Mark44]

I am trying to write a differential evolution in FORTRAN, but I am a bit confused by the concept. I've read through Storn and Price's explanation of the concept, but I'm still not getting it. Can anyone offer a dumb-ed down version of what exactly a differential evolution is?

Rather than have us research this for you, why don't you tell us what Storn and Price have to say. If you have specific questions about their explanation, ask them and someone here can probably explain it to you.

 

[swartzism]

Well if my understanding is correct, a differential evolution takes a function and randomly searches throughout the plane of 1 independent variable and n dependent variables and comes up with a best guess on the global minimum of the n-dimension field.

I'm in abstract algebra, so I'm no stranger to the algorithm given on wikipedia's DE page, but I'm not sure how to move it from theory to a computer screen. Does anyone know of any very basic walk through examples of a differential evolution? Every example I've found is way above my pay grade.