A local analysis of the genotype-fitness mapping in hardware optimization problems

This paper suggests a framework to examine, evaluate and characterize an evolutionary test-program generation problem. The methodology exploits the definition of distance functions at the genotypic and phenotypic levels to perform a local analysis of an unknown space. A hardware accelerator device is used for speeding up test-program evaluations. A complex microprocessor was used as case study. Experiments show how the local analysis allowed discovering several characteristics of the task and foreseeing the behavior of the test-program generation.