I think it's wrong to say you don't have a fitness function. Your fitness function is "Is this string a password?" and the score is binary. Why do you say there is no fitness function?
Also, in your examples, is "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" really a password?
I think it's wrong to say you don't have a fitness function. Your fitness function is "Is this string a password?" and the score is binary. Why do you say there is no fitness function?
Also, in your examples, is "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" really a password?
With regard to the fitness function, I think I agree with you that checking if the offspring matches a password will fall in the category of a fitness function albeit a binary one. I will update my description to include that, thanks.
With regard to if it is useful, I will let it stand or fall on its own merits. If people are going to use it to find bad passwords, then I would say yes it is. It might be pertinent to mention that I am interested in genetic algorithms in general and this is a good practical way of exploring my own theoretical ideas.
Yes, "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" really is a password. Have a look at the rock_you list of passwords and sort them by length. There are some extremely long but silly passwords in there.
When I asked how useful this was, I assumed the organisms were removed from the front of the list. If you keep everything, then yes I can see how this can be used to crack passwords. It's not clear to me how it would be useful otherwise, as which organisms stay in the list is not homogeneously random, and so one organism might be quite unlucky (even though its offspring could have been very successful).
So basically this can be viewed as an accelerated brute-force of long/complex passwords?