Neutrality and self-adaptation

Neutral genotype-phenotype mappings can be observed in natural evolution and are often used in evolutionary computation. In this article, important aspects of such encodings are analyzed.First, it is shown that in the absence of external control neutrality allows a variation of the search distribution independent of phenotypic changes. In particular, neutrality is necessary for self-adaptation, which is used in a variety of algorithms from all main paradigms of evolutionary computation to increase efficiency.Second, the average number of fitness evaluations needed to find a desirable (e.g., optimally adapted) genotype depending on the number of desirable genotypes and the cardinality of the genotype space is derived. It turns out that this number increases only marginally when neutrality is added to an encoding presuming that the fraction of desirable genotypes stays constant and that the number of these genotypes is not too small.

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