The analysis of a recombinative hill-climber on H-IFF

Many experiments have proved that crossover is an essential search operator in evolutionary algorithms, at least for certain functions. However, the rigorous analysis of such algorithms on crossover-friendly functions is still in its infancy. Here, a recombinative hill-climber is analyzed on the crossover-friendly function hierarchical-if-and-only-if (H-IFF) introduced by Watson et al. (1998). The dynamics of this algorithm are investigated and it is proved that the expected optimization time equals (theta)(n log n).