Document Type
Article
Publication Title
IEEE Transactions On Evolutionary Computation
Publisher
IEEE
Publication Date
11-2000
Volume
4
Issue
4
Disciplines
Computer Sciences
Abstract
N-K fitness landscapes have been widely used as examples and test functions in the field of evolutionary computation. Thus, the computational complexity of these landscapes as optimization problems is of interest. We investigate the computational complexity of the problem of optimizing the N-K fitness functions and related fitness functions. We give an algorithm to optimize adjacent-model N-K fitness functions which is polynomial in N. We show that the decision problem corresponding to optimizing random-model N-K fitness functions is NP-complete for K > 1 and is polynomial for K = 1. If the restriction that the ith component function depends on the ith bit is removed, then the problem is NP-complete even for K = 1. We also give a polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the arbitrary-model N-K optimization problem.
Keywords
computational complexity, N-K fitness function, optimization
DOI
10.1109/4235.887236
Rights
© 2000 IEEE
Recommended Citation
A. H. Wright, R. K. Thompson and Jian Zhang, "The computational complexity of N-K fitness functions," in IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 373-379, Nov 2000.