Issues in designing a neutral genotype-phenotype mapping

This paper discusses issues that arise when a redundant genotype-phenotype mapping is used in the context of a real-world application. Previous studies have suggested that a redundant mapping, which introduces neutrality into the search space, can provide a beneficial role. Many of the studies to date have concentrated on relatively abstract search spaces. In this paper we consider these issues in the context of a specific real-world application. We show that redundancy can indeed be useful, but that it must be carefully introduced with due consideration to details of the application being considered, and its associated search space. Although the details of the redundant encoding are specific to the application, we seek to deduce some heuristics that are likely to prove useful for designing genetic encodings for other problems to facilitate search for fitter phenotypes.