Abstracting population based methods

[gnitr]

I think that in Encog 3 the notion of population already exists but it seems to be tied to genetic algorithms like the standard GA and Neat. The evolutionary and swarm intelligence approaches contains many other population-based algorithms other than GA. For instance PSO or differential evolution, both of them can be applied to neural network.

It would probably be good to have a more abstract population-based framework to facilitate the addition of such algorithms in the future. One that would offer generic functions to parallelise the training of the population, implement relevant stopping conditions, allow hybrid algorithms to be plugged in etc.