Scuba Search : when selection meets innovation

TL;DR

The paper introduces Scuba Search, a novel heuristic inspired by diving, that exploits neutrality and evolvability in fitness landscapes to improve search performance, demonstrated through comparative studies on NKq-landscapes.

Contribution

It presents a new search heuristic based on evolvability and neutrality, with a unique two-phase process, and provides visualization of search pathways to analyze qualitative differences.

Findings

Scuba Search outperforms standard heuristics on NKq-landscapes.

The approach exploits neutrality to enhance search exploration.

Visualization reveals distinct pathways in neutral search processes.

Abstract

We proposed a new search heuristic using the scuba diving metaphor. This approach is based on the concept of evolvability and tends to exploit neutrality in fitness landscape. Despite the fact that natural evolution does not directly select for evolvability, the basic idea behind the scuba search heuristic is to explicitly push the evolvability to increase. The search process switches between two phases: Conquest-of-the-Waters and Invasion-of-the-Land. A comparative study of the new algorithm and standard local search heuristics on the NKq-landscapes has shown advantage and limit of the scuba search. To enlighten qualitative differences between neutral search processes, the space is changed into a connected graph to visualize the pathways that the search is likely to follow.