English

Optimizing Epochal Evolutionary Search: Population-Size Independent Theory

adap-org 2007-05-23 v1 Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems Populations and Evolution

Abstract

Epochal dynamics, in which long periods of stasis in population fitness are punctuated by sudden innovations, is a common behavior in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes. We use a recent quantitative mathematical analysis of epochal evolution to estimate, as a function of population size and mutation rate, the average number of fitness function evaluations to reach the global optimum. This is then used to derive estimates of and bounds on evolutionary parameters that minimize search effort.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.adap-org/9810003,
  title  = {Optimizing Epochal Evolutionary Search: Population-Size Independent Theory},
  author = {Erik van Nimwegen and James P. Crutchfield},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:adap-org/9810003},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

18 pages, 5 figures, see archive at http://www.santafe.edu/~evca/

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:40:51.597Z