ara MacNish was instrumental in this part of my academic career. I respect Cara as an individual of significant intellect and I humbly offer Cara my profound thanks and appreciation. I should like to also thank Kaipillil Vijayan for the honour of allowing me to complete a PhD thesis under his supervision. I thank Kaipillil Vijayan also for his personal support and assistance. I could not have completed this doctorate without the collaboration of Berwin Turlach to whom I also owe my profound thanks and appreciation. During this doctorate I contracted a life-threatening illness which left sustained problems with my health. However, with the support of an exceptional team of health professionals I have been able to complete the present work. Thus, my many thanks go to

No abstract

No abstract

Abstract. An important issue in genetic algorithms is the relationship between the difficulty of a problem and the choice of encoding. Two questions remain unanswered: is their a statistically demonstrable relationship between the difficulty of a problem and the choice of encoding, and, if so, what it the actual mechanism by which this occurs?In this paper we use components of a rigorous statistical methodology to demonstrate that the choice of encoding has a real effect upon the difficulty of a problem. Computer animation is then used to illustrate the actual mechanism by which this occurs.