4. Cellular Automata and Fractal Evolution

4.D. Genetic Algorithms and Artificial Evolution - Fitness

The fitness landscape is a graphical representation of a map from genotype space into fitness.
Thinking of the genotype space as a two-dimensional region, the fitness landscape may look like a mountain range above this region.
The linear appropach to finding the most fit solution is to move in genotype space in the direction of most increasing fitness, changing one gene at a time.
This will give a local maximum of fitness, but maybe not the global maximum.
Because crossover allows large excursions in genotype space, it avoids this local max trap.

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