The connectivity of NK landscapes' basins: A network analysis

Citation

Verel S, Ochoa G & Tomassini M (2010) The connectivity of NK landscapes' basins: A network analysis. In: Bullock S, Noble J, Watson R & Bedau M (eds.) Artificial Life XI: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems. Artificial Life XI: Eleventh International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, Winchester, UK, 05.08.2008-08.08.2008. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 648-655. http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/artificial-life-xi

Abstract
We propose a network characterization of combinatorial fitness landscapes by adapting the notion of inherent networks proposed for energy surfaces. We use the well-known family of NK landscapes as an example. In our case the inherent network is the graph where the vertices represent the local maxima in the landscape, and the edges account for the transition probabilities between their corresponding basins of attraction. We exhaustively extracted such networks on representative small NK landscape instances, and performed a statistical characterization of their properties. We found that most of these network properties can be related to the search difficulty on the underlying NK landscapes with varying values of K.