Experimental Supplements to the Theoretical Analysis of Migration in the Island Model

In Lassig and Sudholt (GECCO 2010) the first running time analysis of a non-trivial parallel evolutionary algorithm was presented. It was demonstrated for a constructed function that an island model with migration can drastically outperform both panmictic EAs as well as parallel EAs without migration. This work provides additional empirical results that increase our understanding of why and when migration is essential for this function. We provide empirical evidence complementing the theoretical results, investigate the robustness with respect to the choice of the migration interval and compare various migration topologies using statistical tests.