Hill-Climbing Behavior on Quantized NK-Landscapes

This paper provides guidelines to design climbers considering a landscape shape under study. In particular, we aim at competing best improvement and first improvement strategies, as well as evaluating the behavior of different neutral move policies. Some conclusions are assessed by an empirical analysis on non-neutral (NK-) and neutral (quantized NK-) landscapes. Experiments show the ability of first improvement to explore rugged landscapes, as well as the interest of accepting neutral moves at each step of the search