Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Understanding Complex Evolutionary Systems

Evolutionary computation research frequently relies on the analysis of the time, and know solutions or measures of the quality of solutions found as metrics for comparing different selection schemes, representations, and operators. While these are important tools, more nuanced tools are helpful even when trying to understand relatively simple evolutionary optimizers, and can be critical when coevolution or multicriteria optimization is being performed. The range of useful tools is broad, including theorems, visualizations, new metrics, and novel analysis techniques. This Special Issue presents six papers that include all of these. The purpose of this Special Issue is to expand our tool set for understanding the behavior of complex evolutionary systems. In the judgement of this writer, it is a good beginning, giving many examples, surveying known techniques, presenting new techniques, and giving many possible next steps. A brief summary of each article is provided.