Error Thresholds and Their Relation to Optimal Mutation Rates
ECAL '99 Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Advances in Artificial Life
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PPSN IV Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature
EMO '01 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization
Assortative mating drastically alters the magnitude of error thresholds
PPSN'06 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature
A survey of techniques for characterising fitness landscapes and some possible ways forward
Information Sciences: an International Journal
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This paper investigates the occurrence of error thresholds in genetic algorithms (GAs) running on a wide range of fitness landscape structures. The error threshold, a notion from molecular evolution, is a critical mutation rate beyond which the evolutionary dynamics of a population changes drastically. The paper also introduces Consensus sequence plots, an empirical tool for locating error thresholds on complex landscapes. This plots were borrowed and adapted from theoretical biology. Results suggest that error thresholds occur in GAs but only on landscapes of certain degree of ruggedness or complexity. Moreover, consensus sequence plots can be useful for predicting some features of a landscape such as ruggedness and "step-ness". We argue that error thresholds and consensus sequence plots, may become useful tools for analyzing evolutionary algorithms and visualising the structure of fitness landscapes.