5 Genetic Lineages and A Metaphor of Hill Climbing

What is the effect of increased diversity on search? Chapter 4 showed that diversity can be measured in several often conflicting ways. The relationship between levels of diversity and fitness improvement is clearly not as simple as one would hope.

In this chapter, the genetic diversity in the population is perturbed to increase population edit distance diversity (both measures from Chapter 4) and entropy. A simple but powerful method is employed: lineage selection. After examining the results of this method, a metaphor of hill-climbing is used to support the results presented here and previous results in the literature. Lastly, a sampling analysis is performed to understand the type of solutions genetic programming visits during the course of the evolutionary process.