The Nei’s Standard Genetic Distance in Artificial Evolution

Abstract — In recent years, not only ruggedness but also neutrality has been recognized as an important feature of a fitness landscape for genetic search. Following that the concept of neutrality in artificial evolution originates from Kimura’s neutral theory in natural evolution, it is expected that the dynamics of artificial evolution in the landscapes including neutrality would be described by using techniques in population genetics. Furthermore, new theoretical guidelines might be developed for effective genetic search. In a recent paper [25], we have discussed the use of the Nei’s standard genetic distance, which originates from population genetics, for measuring neutrality of fitness landscapes. In our results, several consistencies with the population genetics have been found by applying the Nei’s standard genetic distance to a tunably neutral NK landscape. In this paper, computer simulations are systematically conducted by using a standard genetic algorithm in order to clarify the characteristics of the Nei’s standard genetic distance. The terraced NK landscape is adopted as a test function. I