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The structure of fitness landscapes, which determine the behaviour of evolutionary processes through mutation and natural selection, is an current issue of theoretical biology. In this colloquium one aspect of the NK-model, which is a biologically motivated construction for complex correlated fitness landscapes, is analyzed with regard to some typical characteristics of fitness landscapes. This aspect is tthe choice of the neighborhood describing the interaction between mutations at different genetic loci. It is shown by simulation that, although the fitness correlation does not depend on the choice of neighborhood, some global measures like the number of maxima and the number of evolutionary accessible paths to the global maximum depend, sometimes strongly, on that choice. Tested examples for choice of neighborhood are random, adjacent and block neighborhood. Also, the distribution of evolutionary accessible paths in the block model is derived from the distribution in the random energy model (House-of-Cards model).

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Benjamin Schmiegelt, University of Cologne
Conference room THP
Contact: not specified