Hop operator

Hopping The hop operator switches positions of two backbone units. 

Deletion, Insertion and Hop Deletion removes a group from the backbone of the repeat unit and insertion performs the complimentary operation of introducing a randomly chosen group into the repeat unit. Hop is a positional mutation operation where two randomly chosen units on the backbone swap their positions. However, hop occurs only if the two positions contain different groups. Hop helps to explore the search space by reordering the repeat unit. From a chemical viewpoint the hop operation examines positional effects in molecules such as conjugation. 

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