Diversity maintenance on neutral landscapes: an argument for recombination

It has been demonstrated that several standard evolutionary computation test problems can be solved by a simple hill climbing search algorithm-often more efficiently than by a population based evolutionary algorithm. There remain some classes of problems, however, for which maintaining a genetically diverse population is essential in order to discover the optimal solution. In biological populations, diversity maintenance is important to enable populations to adapt to rapidly changing environments and to exploit environmental niches. We demonstrate that on a neutral landscape recombination allows a population to maintain a significantly greater level of genetic diversity through the transition between two fitness layers. Recombination may therefore have a role to play in maintaining population diversity across fitness transitions