Some Steps Towards Understanding How Neutrality Affects Evolutionary Search

The effects of neutrality on evolutionary search have been considered in a number of interesting studies, the results of which, however, have been contradictory. We believe that this confusion is due to several reasons. In this paper, we shed some light on neutrality by addressing these problems. That is, we use the simplest possible definition of neutrality, we consider one of the simplest possible algorithms, we apply it to two problems (a unimodal landscape and a deceptive landscape), which we analyse using fitness distance correlation, performance statistics and, critically, tracking the full evolutionary path of individuals within their family tree.

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