Analysis of encoding in 1+1-EA

This paper employs a Markov model to study the relative performance of binary and Gray coding in the 1+1-EA. The expected first passage time to optimality is used as the metric of comparison. The results indicate that while there is not much difference between the two for all possible functions, Gray coding does not necessarily improve performance for functions which have fewer local optima in the Gray representation than in binary. The relative performance is affected by changes in the algorithm parameter (mutation probability).