Fitness Landscape
Channel: Systems Innovation
Date: 2015-07-05

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In this video we will present the concept of a fitness landscape as it is used to model complex adaptive systems, we will provide you with a basic description of how the model works, talk about the key parameter that affect its topology and finally look at the types of strategies used by agents within these different landscapes.

A fitness landscape also called an adaptive landscape is a model that comes from biology where it is used to describe the “fitness” of a creature, or more specifically genotypes, within a particular environment, the better suited the creature to that environment the higher its elevation on this fitness landscape will be. As such it visually represent the dynamics of evolution as a search over a set of possible solutions to a given environmental condition in order to find the optimal strategy which will have the highest elevation on this landscape and receive the highest payoff. As evolution is a fundamental process that plays out across may different types of systems, natural, social and engineered, this model has been abstracted and applied to many different areas in particular within computer science, business management and economics, but is equally applicable to all complex adaptive systems. Within this more generic model a location on the landscape is a solution to a given problem, the elevation captures how functional that solution is and solutions that are similar in nature are typically placed close to each other.
For example the challenge might be commuting to work in the morning, there are many different strategies we could take from flying to possibly swimming to driving our car or taking the bus. We could then create a fitness landscape to represent this where each one of these solutions would be given a fitness value based upon how well it performs against some measurement of success, such as time or cost, the result being swimming or flying will likely end up at a low elevation relative to taking our car or the bus, we might also note that our car or bus strategy would be located in proximity to each other because they have many similarities, while swimming or flying would be placed at very different location on this landscape.
Now that we understand what a fitness landscape model is there are two main things we need to consider, firstly the type of landscape we are dealing with and secondly the types of strategies we might use given these different landscapes. Firstly to talk about the types of landscapes, what we will call their topology, there are a number of different parameters that will define the overall topology. Starting with how different are the payoffs on the landscape, the lower the range between the height of the peaks the more equal the payoffs between strategies, an example of a even topology might be a scenario where I role a fair dice and ask you to try and predict the number it will land on, each number is equally likely to turn up and thus each one of your strategies is an equally viable solution.

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