A rigorous view on neutrality

Abstract—Motivated by neutrality observed in natural evolution often redundant encodings are used in evolutionary algorithms. Many experimental studies have been carried out on this topic. In this paper we present a first rigorous runtime analysis on the effect of using neutrality. We consider a simple model where a layer of constant fitness is distributed in the search space and point out situations where the use of neutrality significantly influence the runtime of an evolutionary algorithm.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CEC
• Authors: Benjamin Doerr, Michael Gnewuch, Nils Hebbinghaus, Frank Neumann
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, CEC 2007, Evolutionary Algorithm, Redundant Encodings, first Rigorous Runtime