Optimal Mutation Rates for the (1+λ) EA on OneMax
Christian Gießen, Carsten Witt · 2016
We study the (1+λ) EA with mutation probability c/n, where c>0 is a constant, on the OneMax problem. Using an improved variable drift theorem, we show that upper and lower bounds on the expected runtime of the (1+λ) EA obtained from variable drift theorems are at most apart by a small lower order term if the exact drift is known. This reduces the analysis of expected optimization time to finding an exact expression for the drift.