Introducing a New Persistence Measure

Abstract

Persistence is a characteristic that distinguishes between different types of objects in our world: alive or dead, stable or unstable. The fact that some objects are able to persist, both in static and dynamic ways, and others are not, appears to be a cornerstone of why interesting things happen in our universe. Hence, the class of dynamical systems in which persistence plays an important role should be a very interesting class of systems. Persistence also appears to be an important aspect of the dynamics displayed by evolutionary search algorithms. In this paper I shall introduce a new measure of static persistence that is more sophisticated than the measure used in previous work. It is shown how this new measure may be useful in distinguishing between dynamics that are performing search and those that are not.