Speeding up Evolutionary Algorithms by Restricted Mutation Operators

We investigate the effect of restricting the mutation operator in evolutionary algorithms with respect to the runtime behavior. Considering the Eulerian cycle problem we present runtime bounds on evolutionary algorithms with a restricted operator that are much smaller than the best upper bounds for the general case. In our analysis it turns out that a plateau which has to be coped with for both algorithms changes its structure in a way that allows the algorithms to obtain an improvement much faster. In addition, we present a lower bound for the general case which shows that the restricted operator speeds up computation by at least a linear factor.