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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