Multi-Parent's Niche: n-ary Crossovers on NK-Landscapes

Using the multi-parent diagonal and scanning crossover in GAs reproduction operators obtain an adjustable arity. Hereby sexuality becomes a graded feature instead of a Boolean one. Our main objective is to relate the performance of GAs to the extent of sexuality used for reproduction on less arbitrary functions then those reported in the current literature. We investigate GA behaviour on Kauffman's NK-landscapes that allow for systematic characterization and user control of ruggedness of the fitness landscape. We test GAs with a varying extent of sexuality, ranging from asexual to ’very sexual’. Our tests were performed on two types of NK-landscapes: landscapes with random and landscapes with nearest neighbour epistasis. For both landscape types we selected landscapes from a range of ruggednesses. The results confirm the superiority of (very) sexual recombination on mildly epistatic problems.

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