An Analysis of the Effects of Lifetime Learning on Population Fitness and Diversity in an NK Fitness Landscape

This paper examines the effects of lifetime learning on the diversity and fitness of a population. Our experiments measure the phenotypic diversity of populations evolving by purely genetic means (population learning) and of others employing both population learning and lifetime learning. The results obtained show, as in previous work, that the addition of lifetime learning results in higher levels of fitness than population learning alone. More significantly, results from the diversity measure show that lifetime learning is capable of sustaining higher levels of diversity than population learning alone.