Fitness Landscapes and Evolvability

Abstract

In this paper, we develop techniques based on evolvability statistics of the fitness land-scape surrounding sampled solutions. Averaging the measures over a sample of equal fitness solutions allows us to build up fitness evolvability portraits of the fitness land-scape, which we show can be used to compare both the ruggedness and neutrality in a set of tunably rugged and tunably neutral landscapes. We further show that the tech-niques can be used with solution samples collected through both random sampling of the landscapes and online sampling during optimization. Finally, we apply the techniques to two real evolutionary electronics search spaces and highlight differences between the two search spaces, comparing with the time taken to find good solutions through search.