Narrow Results

The importance of applying game theory to the evolution of information in the presence of noise has recently become widely recognized. This Special Issue addresses the theme of spontaneously emergent order in both classical and quantum systems subject to external noise, and includes papers directly related to game theory or the development of supporting techniques. In the following editorial overview we examine the broader context of the subject, including the tension between the destructive and creative aspects of noise, and foreshadow the significance of some of the subsequent papers in the volume.

Fitness landscapes can be decomposed into elementary landscapes using a Fourier transform that is determined by the structure of the underlying configuration space. The amplitude spectrum obtained from the Fourier transform contains information about the ruggedness of the landscape. It can be used for classification and comparison purposes. We consider here three very different types of landscapes using both mutation and recombination to define the topological structure of the configuration spaces. A reliable procedure for estimating the amplitude spectra is presented. The method is based on certain correlation functions that are easily obtained from empirical studies of the landscapes.

This is a topical issue on the 16th Asia–Pacific Symposium on Intelligent and Evolutionary Systems (IES) which was held in Kyoto from December 12–14, 2012. This special issue contains six articles related to evolutionary algorithms that are designed to solve optimization problems, network concepts, mathematical methods and their real world applications.