A Timing Analysis of Convergence to Fitness Sharing Equilibrium

Fitness sharing has been shown to be an effective niching mechanism in genetic algorithms (GAs). Sharing allows GAs to maintain multiple, cooperating “species” in a single population for many generations under severe selective pressure. While recent studies have shown that the maintenance time for niching equilibrium is long, it has never been shown that the time it takes to reach equilibrium is sufficiently fast. While experiments indicate that selection under fitness sharing drives the population to equilibrium just as fast and as effectively as selection alone drives the simple GA to a uniform population, we can now show analytically that this is the case.

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