The Age-Layered Population Structure (ALPS) paradigm is a novel metaheuristic for overcoming premature convergence by running multiple instances of a search algorithm simultaneously. In the field of optimization algorithms, one type of algorithmic improvement is that of increasing the speed at which problems of solvable difficulty can be solved. This is shown in papers in which the comparison is on which algorithm can find the global optima of a benchmark problem in the fewest number of evaluations. Another type of algorithmic improvement is increasing the robustness of the algorithm. That is, either increasing the reliability of finding the global optima or being able to find better results then other algorithms. A typical approach to addressing premature convergence is to restart the search algorithm, but one challenge is in deciding when the population is truly stuck. Another problem is that all the information learned from one run is not passed to the next run. An alternative to restarting the entire search algorithm is to run multiple EAs simultaneously and only restart one of them, and this is what is done with ALPS. The Age-Layered Population Structure (ALPS) paradigm is a novel metaheuristic for overcoming premature convergence by running multiple instances of a search algorithm simultaneously. A novel measure of age is used to segregate individuals into different age-layers and then, at regular intervals, the youngest layer is replaced with randomly generated individuals. ALPS was developed to be a way to make other search algorithms more robust, especially on hard problems, but at the cost of potentially slowing them down on easier problems. For more details refer to the web page or publications: http://idesign.ucsc.edu/projects/alps.html Hornby, G. S. (2009) "Steady-State ALPS for Real-Valued Problems", Proc. of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, ACM Press. Hornby, G. S. (2009) "A Steady-State Version of the Age-Layered Population Structure EA" , Genetic Programming Theory & Practice VII. Hornby, G. S. (2006) "ALPS: The Age-Layered Population Structure for Reducing the Problem of Premature Convergence", Proc. of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, ACM Press. The library should compile with './configure && make'. 'make install' will install the following files: /usr/local |-- bin | `-- alps-config |-- include | `-- alps | |-- alps.h | |-- gen.h | |-- history.h | |-- individ.h | |-- individ_bits.h | |-- individ_real.h | |-- layer.h | |-- random_mt.h | |-- sstate.h | `-- utils.h `-- lib |-- libalps-1.1.2.dylib |-- libalps.a |-- libalps.dylib -> libalps-1.1.2.dylib |-- libalps.la `-- pkgconfig `-- alps.pc To install the libraries to directory other than '/usr/local', execute './configure --prefix=$DIR && make && make install'. There are two example programs 'examples/evo_real' and 'examples/evo_real_barebones'.