On evolution strategy optimization in dynamic environments

The article analyzes the behavior of evolution strategies and their current mutation variants on a simple rotating dynamic problem. The degree of rotation is a parameter for the involved dynamism which enables systematic examinations. As a result, the complex covariance matrix adaptation proves to be superior with slow rotation but with increasing dynamism whose adaptation mechanism seldom finds the optimum where the simple uniform adaptation produces stable results. Moreover, this examination gives rise to questioning the principle of small mutation changes with high probability in the dynamic context.