Impact of regulatory genes on optimization behavior

In nature, regulatory genes determine which part of an organism's genome is expressed. In this study a simple regulatory mechanism is used to modify linear representations. The regulatory mechanism substantially enhances exploration at the expense of exploitation. For complex, polymodal fitness landscapes the modification yields a substantial improvement in performance. A negative control example demonstrates the technique yields a remarkable degradation in performance on a unimodal optimization problem designed to interact poorly with the technique. Analysis shows that the regulatory mechanism creates the potential for insertion and deletion mutations within the linear representation. These mutations have the effect of substantially increasing the number of genomes one mutation away from any given genome. This has the effect of decreasing the diameter of any search space where they regulatory technique is implemented.