In computer science, evolutionary computation is a subfield of artificial intelligence (more particularly soft computing) that can be defined by the type of algorithms it is concerned with. These algorithms, called evolutionary algorithms, are based on adopting Darwinian principles, hence the name. Technically they belong to the family of trial and error problem solvers and can be considered global optimization methods with a metaheuristic or stochastic optimization character, distinguished by the use of a population of candidate solutions (rather than just iterating over one point in the search space). The application of recombination and evolutionary strategies makes them less prone to get stuck in local optima than alternative methods.