A Simple Haploid-Diploid Evolutionary Algorithm
This work addresses a specific issue in evolutionary computing for researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on known biological insights to propose a minor algorithmic tweak.
The authors tackled the problem of evolutionary algorithms struggling on rugged fitness landscapes by introducing a simple haploid-diploid modification, showing that it improves performance as landscape ruggedness increases, with benefits demonstrated using the NK model.
It has recently been suggested that evolution exploits a form of fitness landscape smoothing within eukaryotic sex due to the haploid-diploid cycle. This short paper presents a simple modification to the standard evolutionary computing algorithm to similarly benefit from the process. Using the well-known NK model of fitness landscapes it is shown that the benefit emerges as ruggedness is increased.