Hyperspace geography: visualizing fitness landscapes beyond 4D.

Human perception is finely tuned to extract structure about the 4D world of time and space as well as properties such as color and texture. Developing intuitions about spatial structure beyond 4D requires exploiting other perceptual and cognitive abilities. One of the most natural ways to explore complex spaces is for a user to actively navigate through them, using local explorations and global summaries to develop intuitions about structure, and then testing the developing ideas by further exploration.

Transient phenomena in learning and evolution: genetic assimilation and genetic redistribution.

Deacon has recently proposed that complexes of genes can be integrated into functional groups as a result of environmental changes that mask and unmask selection pressures. For example, many animals endogenously synthesize ascorbic acid (vitamin C), but anthropoid primates have only a nonfunctional version of the crucial gene for this pathway. It is hypothesized that the loss of functionality occurred in the evolutionary past when a diet rich in vitamin C masked the effect of the gene, and its loss effectively trapped the animals in a fruit-eating lifestyle.

Mapping the royal road and other hierarchical functions.

In this paper we present a technique for visualising hierarchical and symmetric, multi-modal fitness functions that have been investigated in the evolutionary computation literature. The focus of this technique is on landscapes in moderate-dimensional, binary spaces (i.e.