Digital circuit evolution: the ruggedness and neutrality of two-bit multiplier landscapes

The two-bit multiplier is a simple electronic circuit, small enough to be feasible for evolutionary design, and practically useful as a fundamental building block used in the synthesis of many digital systems. To attain understanding of the evolvability of this digital circuit, we consider its evolutionary design as a search on a fitness landscape. We study the structure of two-bit multiplier landscapes in terms of their ruggedness and neutrality. The motivation behind this research is to attain better understanding of how these characteristics are related to the feasibility of evolving digital circuits