Fitness landscapes and evolvability
Evolutionary Computation
Through the Labyrinth Evolution Finds a Way: A Silicon Ridge
ICES '96 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware
Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
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Fitness landscapes which include neutrality have been conceptualized as containing neutral networks. Since the introduction of this concept, EC researchers have expected that a population can move along neutral networks without getting trapped on local optima. On the other hand, it has been demonstrated in tunably neutral NK landscapes that neutrality does not affect the ruggedness, although it does reduce the number of local optima. These show that the effects of neutrality are still contentious issues. This paper investigates the effects of neutrality and ruggedness on topologies of fitness andscapes. A neutral network of a fitness landscape is described in a mathematical form based on Harvey's original definition with minor modifications. Our results demonstrate that landscapes with a higher degree of neutrality have the larger sizes of neutral networks. For landscapes with the lowest degree of ruggedness, all networks lead to the networks of the highest fitness via any networks. For landscapes with a higher degree of ruggedness, there are few contact points between the networks of high fitness and the ones of the highest fitness, which seem to be isolated, deceptive or rugged.