An Analysis of both Fitness and Diversity

This paper examines the effects of lifetime learning on pop-ulations evolving genetically in a series of changing environ-ments. The analysis of both fitness and diversity of the pop-ulations provides an insight into the improved performance provided by lifetime learning. The NK fitness landscape model is employed as the problem task, which has the advan-tage of being able to generate a variety of fitness landscapes of varying difficulty. Experiments observe the response of populations in an environment where problem difficulty in-creases and decreases with varying frequency. Results show that lifetime learning is capable of overall higher fitness levels and, in addition, that lifetime learning stimulates the diversity of the population. This increased diversity allows lifetime learning a greater level of recovery and stability than evolu-tionary learning alone