Some Steps Towards Understanding How Neutrality Affects Evolutionary Search
نویسندگان
چکیده
The effects of neutrality on evolutionary search have been considered in a number of interesting studies, the results of which, however, have been contradictory. We believe that this confusion is due to several reasons. In this paper, we shed some light on neutrality by addressing these problems. That is, we use the simplest possible definition of neutrality, we consider one of the simplest possible algorithms, we apply it to two problems (a unimodal landscape and a deceptive landscape), which we analyse using fitness distance correlation, performance statistics and, critically, tracking the full evolutionary path of individuals within their family tree.
منابع مشابه
An Empirical Investigation of How Degree Neutrality Affects GP Search
Over the last years, neutrality has inspired many researchers in the area of Evolutionary Computation (EC) systems in the hope that it can aid evolution. However, there are contradictory results on the effects of neutrality in evolutionary search. The aim of this paper is to understand how neutrality named in this paper degree neutrality affects GP search. For analysis purposes, we use a well-d...
متن کاملDigital Circuit Evolution: The Ruggedness and Neutrality of Two-Bit Multiplier Landscapes
The two-bit multiplier is a simple electronic circuit, small enough to be feasible for evolutionary design, and practically useful as a fundamental building block used in the synthesis of many digital systems. To attain understanding of the evolvability of this digital circuit, we consider its evolutionary design as a search on a fitness landscape. We study the structure of two-bit multiplier l...
متن کاملRobustness, Evolvability, and Accessibility in Linear Genetic Programming
Whether neutrality has positive or negative effects on evolutionary search is a contentious topic, with reported experimental results supporting both sides of the debate. Most existing studies use performance statistics, e.g., success rate or search efficiency, to investigate if neutrality, either embedded or artificially added, can benefit an evolutionary algorithm. Here, we argue that underst...
متن کاملWhere are bottlenecks in NK fitness landscapes?
Usually the offspring-parent fitness correlation is used to visualize and analyze some caracteristics of fitness landscapes such as evolvability. In this paper, we introduce a more general representation of this correlation, the Fitness Cloud (FC). We use the bottleneck metaphor to emphasise fitness levels in landscape that cause local search process to slow down. For a local search heuristic s...
متن کاملA Component Based Heuristic Search Method with Evolutionary Eliminations
Nurse rostering is a complex scheduling problem that affects hospital personnel on a daily basis all over the world. This paper presents a new component-based approach with evolutionary eliminations, for a nurse scheduling problem arising at a major UK hospital. The main idea behind this technique is to decompose a schedule into its components (i.e. the allocated shift pattern of each nurse), a...
متن کامل