text: The sine-cosine algorithm (SCA) is a new population-based meta-heuristic algorithm. In addition to exploiting sine and cosine functions to perform local and global searches (hence the name sine-cosine), the SCA introduces several random and adaptive parameters to facilitate the search process. Although it shows promising results, the search process of the SCA is vulnerable to local minima maxima due to the adoption of a fixed switch probability and the bounded magnitude of the sine and cosine functions (from -1 to 1). In this paper, we propose a new hybrid Q-learning sine-cosine- based strategy, called the Q-learning sine-cosine algorithm (QLSCA). Within the QLSCA, we eliminate the switching probability. Instead, we rely on the Q-learning algorithm (based on the penalty and reward mechanism) to dynamically identify the best operation during runtime. Additionally, we integrate two new operations (Le´vy flight motion and crossover) into the QLSCA to facilitate jumping out of local minima maxima and enhance the solution diversity. To assess its performance, we adopt the QLSCA for the combinatorial test suite minimization problem. Experimental results reveal that the QLSCA is statistically superior with regard to test suite size reduction compared to recent state-of-the-art strategies, including the original SCA, the particle swarm test generator (PSTG), adaptive particle swarm optimization (APSO) and the cuckoo search strategy (CS) at the 95 confidence level. However, concerning the comparison with discrete particle swarm optimization (DPSO), there is no significant difference in performance at the 95 confidence level. On a positive note, the QLSCA statistically outperforms the DPSO in certain configurations at the 90 confidence level.
  @cite_33: Combinatorial testing is a specification-based testing criterion, which requires that for each t-way combination of input parameters of a system, every combination of valid values of these t parameters be covered by at least one test case. This approach is motivated by the observation that in many applications a significant number of faults are caused by interactions of a smaller number of parameters. In this paper, we propose new test generation algorithms for combinatorial testing based on two artificial life techniques: a genetic algorithm (GA) and an ant colony algorithm (ACA). The usefulness of these algorithms is demonstrated through experiments. In the case t = 3 in particular, our algorithms exhibited impressive results
summary: @cite_33 adopted a genetic algorithm (GA) based on natural selection. Initially, the GA begins with randomly created test cases called chromosomes. These chromosomes undergo crossover and mutation until the termination criterion is met. In each cycle, the best chromosomes are probabilistically selected and added to the final test suite.