On the "Explorative Power" of ES/EP-like Algorithms

This paper discusses the question how ES/EP-like algorithms perform the evolutionary search in real-valued N-dimensional parameter spaces. It will be shown that the sometimes invoked model of a perturbed gradient search does not seem to give an appropriate picture of the search process. Instead, the search behavior is described as the antagonism of exploitation and exploration, where exploitation works in one dimension, whereas the exploration is a random walk on a (N ? 1)-dimensional manifold in the search space. As an example the exploration dynamics on the sphere model will be investigated.