Neutrality and gradualism: encouraging exploration and exploitation simultaneously with Binary Decision Diagrams

Search algorithms are subject to the trappings of local optima. Attempts to address the problem are often framed in the context of needing to balance, or trade-off, exploitation against exploration. Ideally, it is best to maximise both simultaneously, but this is usually seen as infeasible in the presence of multi-modal search spaces. This paper investigates the potential for exploration of both neutrality and mutation rate, and argues that the former is the more important. The most interesting result, however, is that the necessity for a trade-off between exploitation and exploration can be avoided within the context of our algorithm for evolving binary decision diagrams.