Elsevier

Theoretical Computer Science

Volume 425, 30 March 2012, Pages 34-57
Theoretical Computer Science

A study of the neutrality of Boolean function landscapes in genetic programming

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Abstract

The neutrality of genetic programming Boolean function landscapes is investigated in this paper. Compared with some well-known contributions on the same issue, (i) we first define new measures which help in characterizing neutral landscapes; (ii) we use a new sampling methodology, which captures features that are disregarded by uniform random sampling; (iii) we introduce new genetic operators to define the neighborhood of tree structures; and (iv) we compare the fitness landscape induced by different sets of functional operators. This study indicates the existence of a relationship between our neutrality measures and the performance of genetic programming for the problems studied.

Keywords

Neutrality
Fitness landscapes
Boolean functions
Genetic programming
Problem difficulty
Negative slope coefficient

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