| Abstract: | Natural selection acts on genetic variation that comes from two principal sources: mutation and recombination. Because of the inherent differences between mutation and recombination, it is often assumed that they are qualitatively different ways to explore the genotype space. In this paper a new way of constructing recombination spaces is introduced and the topological features of the resulting hypergraphs are analyzed. It is shown that types which are neighbors in the point mutation space are also neighbors in the recombination space, i.e., mutation and recombination spaces are homomorphic. This implies that the shapes of the fitness functions explored by mutation and recombination are similar. However, the potential of one- and two-point recombination operators to explore the fitness landscape may differ dramatically from uniform recombination operators or mutation operators because of the limited number of recombinant types they can produce. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. |
