Migration Rates and Optimal Topologies

This chapter extended the previous deme-sizing equations to consider configurations that are likely to be used by practitioners. The first part of the chapter described the relation between the deme size, the migration rate, and the topology’s degree with the probability of success after two epochs. It showed how to find the configuration that optimizes the execution time while reaching a predetermined target quality. These calculations were also used to find an alternate expression for the optimal number of fully-connected demes (which was calculated initially in Chapter 4). Although this topology cannot integrate many demes, it can reduce the execution time substantially, and it may be competitive with other optimally-configured topologies.