Modeling epistatic interactions in fitness landscapes

The NK model introduced by Kauffman (1993) has been widely accepted as a formal model of rugged fitness landscapes. It is shown that the NK model is incapable of accurately modeling an important class of combinatorial optimization problems. Most notable is the limitation in modeling the epistatic relationships that exist in many real-world constrained optimization problems. In addition to introducing a new method of graphically depicting all high dimension fitness landscapes, an extension to the NK model is proposed.