The Importance of Neutral Mutations in GP

Understanding how neutrality works in EC systems has drawn increasing attention. However, some researchers have found neutrality to be beneficial for the evolutionary process while others have found it either useless or worse. We believe there are various reasons for these contradictory results: (a) many studies have based their conclusions using crossover and mutation as main operators rather than using only mutation (Kimura’s studies were done analysing only mutations) and, (b) studies often consider problems and representation with larger complexity. The aim of this paper is to analyse how neutral mutations tend to behave in GP and establish how important they are. For this purpose we introduce an approach which has two advantages: (a) it allows us to specify neutrality and, (b) this makes possible to understand how neutrality affects the evolutionary search process