Lévy flights in neutral fitness landscapes

Marco Tomassini

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2016, vol. 448, issue C, 163-171

Abstract: Regions of equal or close fitness are common in biological and artificial evolutionary systems. Customary hill-climbing optimizing paradigms turn out to be unsuitable to walk and search such large neutral networks. Here we propose a new technique to quickly jump out of neutral networks and to reach better fitness regions. The algorithm, based on Lévy flights, is compared to an established nearest neighbors random drift technique on two families of constructive neutral landscapes called the NKq and the NKp ensembles. The results of our numerical simulations clearly show that the new algorithm performs better than the nearest neighbors random drift for all studied landscapes. We conclude with some explanations of the observed behavior and some suggestions for the use of Lévy flights in more general search and optimization heuristics.

Keywords: Neutrality; Fitness landscapes; Lévy flights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:448:y:2016:i:c:p:163-171

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2015.12.062

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