On Properties of Genetic Operators from a Network Analytical Viewpoint

In recent years, network analysis has revealed that some real networks have the properties of small-world and/or scale-free networks. In this paper, a simple Genetic Algorithm (GA) is regarded as a network where each node and each edge respectively represent a population and the possibility of the transition between two nodes. The characteristic path length, which is one of the most popular criterion in small-world networks, is derived analytically. The results show how the crossover operation works in GAs to shorten the path length between two populations, compared to the length of the network with the mutation operation.