Just What Are Building Blocks?

摘要

Using an exact coarse-grained formulation of the dynamics of a GA we investigate in the context of a tunable family of “modular” fitness landscapes under what circumstances one would expect recombination to be “useful”. We show that this depends not only on the fitness landscape and the state of the population but also on the particular crossover mask under consideration. We conclude that rather than ask when recombination is useful or not one needs to ask - what crossover masks are useful. We show that the answer to this is when the natural “building blocks” of the landscape are compatible with the “building blocks” defined by the crossover mask.