Related papers: Error Thresholds on Dynamic Fittness-Landscapes
In evolution theory the concept of a fitness landscape has played an important role, evolution itself being portrayed as a hill-climbing process on a rugged landscape. In this article it is shown that in general, in the presence of other…
A deterministic mutation-selection model in the sequence space approach is investigated. Genotypes are identified with two-letter sequences. Mutation is modelled as a Markov process, fitness functions are of Hopfield type, where the fitness…
We present a new method for proving lower bounds on the expected running time of evolutionary algorithms. It is based on fitness-level partitions and an additional condition on transition probabilities between fitness levels. The method is…
We study self-replicating molecules under externally varying conditions. Changing conditions such as temperature variations and/or alterations in the environment's resource composition lead to both non-constant replication and decay rates…
We consider the quasispecies description of a population evolving in both the "master sequence" landscape (where a single sequence is evolutionarily preferred over all others) and the REM landscape (where the fitness of different sequences…
We study the evolution of mutation rates for an asexual population living on a static fitness landscape, consisting of multiple peaks forming an evolutionary staircase. The optimal mutation rate is found by maximizing the diffusion towards…
A common view in evolutionary biology is that mutation rates are minimised. However, studies in combinatorial optimisation and search have shown a clear advantage of using variable mutation rates as a control parameter to optimise the…
A simple analytical framework to study the molecular quasispecies evolution of finite populations is proposed, in which the population is assumed to be a random combination of the constiyuent molecules in each generation,i.e., linkage…
A fitness landscape is a genetic space -- with two genotypes adjacent if they differ in a single locus -- and a fitness function. Evolutionary dynamics produce a flow on this landscape from lower fitness to higher; reaching equilibrium only…
Sewall Wright's adaptive landscape metaphor penetrates a significant part of evolutionary thinking. Supplemented with Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection and Kimura's maximum principle, it provides a unifying and intuitive…
Fitness landscapes are a useful concept to study the dynamics of meta-heuristics. In the last two decades, they have been applied with success to estimate the optimization power of several types of evolutionary algorithms, including genetic…
This is an introductory review of deterministic mutation-selection models for asexual populations (i.e., quasispecies theory) and related topics. First, the basic concepts of fitness, mutations, and sequence space are introduced. Different…
One of the first and easy to use techniques for proving run time bounds for evolutionary algorithms is the so-called method of fitness levels by Wegener. It uses a partition of the search space into a sequence of levels which are traversed…
A quasispecies evolving on a fitness landscape with a single peak of fluctuating height is studied. In the approximation that back mutations can be ignored, the rate equations can be solved analytically. It is shown that the error threshold…
In this paper we study the evolution of the mutation rate for simple organisms in dynamic environments. A model with multiple fitness coding loci tracking a moving fitness peak is developed and an analytical expression for the optimal…
Species evolution is essentially a random process of interaction between biological populations and their environments. As a result, some physical parameters in evolution models are subject to statistical fluctuations. In this paper, two…
We consider evolution of a large population, where fitness of each organism is defined by many phenotypical traits. These traits result from expression of many genes. We propose a new model of gene regulation, where gene expression is…
The fitness level method is a popular tool for analyzing the hitting time of elitist evolutionary algorithms. Its idea is to divide the search space into multiple fitness levels and estimate lower and upper bounds on the hitting time using…
In the empirical study of evolutionary algorithms, the solution quality is evaluated by either the fitness value or approximation error. The latter measures the fitness difference between an approximation solution and the optimal solution.…
A simple model of language evolution, proposed in \cite{K_N}, is characterized by a pay-off in communicative function, and by an error in learning, that measures the accuracy in language acquisition. In the mean field approximation, this…