On the roles of redundancy and neutrality in evolutionary optimization
Marisol B. Correia, Carlos M. Fonseca · 2007
An experimental study was performed to explore whether it is neutrality itself or simply the larger neighborhoods associated with neutral representations that influence the results achieved by evolutionary algorithms on NK fitness landscape problems.Markov chains were used to model the behaviour of a stochastic hill-climber on NK fitness landscapes, using two different types of representation: a neutral network representation which exhibits neutrality and a redundant representation without neutrality which implements the same neighborhood induced by the corresponding neutral representation.