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 Pierrick Legrand · Marc-Michel Corsini
Jin-Kao Hao · Nicolas Monmarché
Evelyne Lutton · Marc Schoenauer (Eds.)
LNCS 8752

Artificial Evolution
11th International Conference, Evolution Artificielle, EA 2013
Bordeaux, France, October 21–23, 2013
Revised Selected Papers

123
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8752
Commenced Publication in 1973
Founding and Former Series Editors:
Gerhard Goos, Juris Hartmanis, and Jan van Leeuwen

Editorial Board
David Hutchison
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Takeo Kanade
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Josef Kittler
University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
Jon M. Kleinberg
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
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ETH Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland
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Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
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Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
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Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India
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TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany
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More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7407
Pierrick Legrand Marc-Michel Corsini
•

Jin-Kao Hao Nicolas Monmarché

•

Evelyne Lutton Marc Schoenauer (Eds.)

•

Artificial Evolution
11th International Conference,
Evolution Artificielle, EA 2013
Bordeaux, France, October 21–23, 2013
Revised Selected Papers

123
Editors
Pierrick Legrand Nicolas Monmarché
INRIA Bordeaux sud-ouest, Equipe CQFD, Laboratoire d’Informatique de
Institut de Mathématiques de Bordeaux l’Université de Tours,
(IMB), UMR CNRS 5251, Ecole Polytechnique de l’Université
Université de Bordeaux, de Tours,
3ter place de la victoire, 33076 Bordeaux, 64 avenue Jean Portalis, 37200 Tours,
France France
Marc-Michel Corsini Evelyne Lutton
Université de Bordeaux, INRA, UMR 782 GMPA,
3ter place de la victoire, 33076 Bordeaux, 1 Av. Brétignière,
France 78850, Thirverval-Grignon,
France
Jin-Kao Hao
LERIA, Marc Schoenauer
Université d’Angers, Equipe TAO, INRIA Futurs, LRI,
2 Bd Lavoisier, 49045 Angers Cedex 01, Université de Paris-Sud,
France Bât 490, 91405 Orsay cedex,
France

ISSN 0302-9743 ISSN 1611-3349 (electronic)

ISBN 978-3-319-11682-2 ISBN 978-3-319-11683-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-11683-9

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 Artificial Evolution 2013, Presented by W.B. Langdon

It was my pleasure, as an invited speaker at Arti-

ficial Evolution 2013 Bordeaux, to be invited by
Pierrick Legrand to contribute this view of the
conference. First, let me thank Pierrick and the
whole EA 2013 conference in general for their
kind invitation and wonderful hospitality.
Although I saw most of the posters and presenta-
tions, it is impossible to treat them all fairly, for
that, I must direct you to the individual papers,
instead this will be a personal view
For me the conference started in bright sun-
shine, with registration in the newly completed
Inria building in Bordeaux. All the sessions were
held in the Ada Lovelace room. The first session
concerned solving discrete problems with presen-
tations by Rym Nesrine Guibadj on a delivery van
route application and then Olivier Gach on
detecting clusters in potentially small world
neighbor connectivity graphs. During the conference several presenters said they used
Pascal which provoked discussion about its merits versus the wisdom of more main-
stream languages such as C and Java. The second part of the session contained pre-
sentations by Ines Sghir and Fazia Aiboud. Although they continued the discrete
mathematics theme, Fazia’s talk on cellular automata was motivated by the desire to
model living cells within human organs.
Arnaud Liefooghe’s presentation continued the discrete mathematics theme from the
first session and included enumerating many benchmarks looking for features to
explain their difficulty for multi-objective solvers. Sandra Astete Morales showed new
proofs for the speed at which EAs will approach an optimum in continuous problems
where in the neighborhood of the optimum the objective function falls as the square of
the distance from it. Notice that finding the exact optimum is hard without additional
assumptions as the guidance the objective function provides dies toward zero as the
optimum is approached. Optima of continuous problems can often be represented by
the first few terms of a Taylor expansion and thus often have this sphere x2-like
property. I wondered if tighter bounds might be found by using the fact that Sandra’s
theorems assumed Gaussian noise, whose variances can be simply summed. Charlie
Vanaret’s Charibde program married differential evolution with branch and bound to
manage the problem in applications with many dimensions that branch and bound
potentially needs to keep track of an exponentially large number of options which must
still be explored.
VI Artificial Evolution 2013, Presented by W.B. Langdon

The final session on Monday returned to evolving solutions for applications. Hoang
Luong presented his work on using genetic algorithms to optimally plan extensions to
the Dutch electricity distribution network (10–50 KV) on the assumption that demand
for electricity will continue to grow in parts of the Netherlands. Then, Laetitia Jourdan
presented work by Khedidja Seridi on using ParadisEO to try to attribute diseases,
particularly human diseases, to genetic mutations (SNPs).
In the evening, Inria and the conference were opened to both the conference
attendees and the members of the public for an exhibition of more than 30 evolved art
pieces by 13 international artists. Many of these were visually stunning colored pictures
but they also included fashionable textiles and tapestries. The exhibit commenced with
Emmanuel Cayla elaborating on how he used the Evelyne Lutton’s ArtiE-Fract soft-
ware to interactively evolve mathematical fractal patterns and then used the tool to
build on these to give vent to his artistic desires. Evelyne Lutton provided a real-time
translation from French to English.
Tuesday morning we started with a nice presentation by Federic Kruger on using
computer graphics hardware (GPU) within the EASEA platform to evolve predictions
for electricity demand in Strasbourg. This was closely followed by Alberto Tonda’s
description of using evolutionary computation and user interaction to control which
variables cause others (the direction of inference) in Bayesian networks. Alberto’s
target was Bayesian networks for use in the French food industry, particularly the
creation of learning networks for cheese ripening and biscuit baking.
Prof. Jean Louis Deneubourg from the Université libre de Bruxelles’ unit of social
ecology (USE) gave a wonderful invited talk including the mathematical scaling laws
observed in social animals, particularly cockroaches.
The poster session included new nature inspired algorithms and new approaches to
new delivery van scheduling problems.
After lunch we were treated to Christian Blum’s description of using ant colony
optimization (ACO) in combination with beam search applied to the problem of finding
the longest repetition-free subsequence in Bioinformatics strings.
No trip to Bordeaux would be complete without a visit to the wine country. Tuesday
evening we were whisked through the Bordeaux region to St. Emillion. First, a very
informative tour of the town itself, in which our guide pointed out the ancient forti-
fication constructed under the orders of John “Lackland” (known in England as King
John, 1166–1216) who then, but not for much longer, ruled this part of France. Since
St. Emillion was claimed both by the King of France and that of England, the people of
Saint Emillion tactfully refer to it as “the King’s tower” without saying which king.
After an unnoticed incident with the first bus, we moved seamlessly in a second to a
nearby chateau (Chateau de Sarpe) and its vineyards. Arriving before sunset to see the
same we received a very informative and entertaining description of its recent history
and viticulture before retiring to its ground level cellars to see both the current and
aging vintages and hear more of their production. Many estimates were made of the
value of the fluid concealed within the oaken barrels before ample opportunity to
sample the same stiffened with numerous fine French cheeses and preserved meats.
Wednesday morning, wishing to refresh my presentation slides, I was late and so
have little report on the second theory session. Nonetheless after it, in the genetic
programming session, Nuno Lourenco gave a nice discursive talk on using an
 Artificial Evolution 2013, Presented by W.B. Langdon VII

evolutionary algorithm, grammatical evolution, to evolve the selection step in another

evolutionary algorithm. He applied the resulting hyper-heuristic to knapsack problems
and also described extensions he made to the traditional Backus-Naur Form (BNF)
grammar used in GE.
After my talk, we proceeded on foot happily as usual to the nearby Brasserie “Le
7eme Art” for lunch. During dessert the heavens opened and we were treated to a fine
display of lightning with thunder accompaniment. As might be guessed no one was
keen to run back to the Inria building. Instead my suggestion that we put the show on in
the restaurant was met with approval by all1 except, surprisingly, by Alina Mereuta,
who was to be the first speaker. Due to heroic efforts by Pierrick, Evelyne, Laetitia
Grimaldi, and Ingrid Rochel and the Inria EA 2013 conference souvenir umbrellas we
did indeed return to Inria and Alina extracted her revenge. Nonetheless, her talk on
using CMA-ES in real time to optimally rebalance the colours used on web pages to
best alleviate the effects of color blindness was well received and provoked a lively
discussion. Which included many suggestions such as: caching answers for the same or
similar pages; treating CMA as an anytime algorithm and updating the display each
time it finds a better answer, rather than waiting for it to find the optimal answer; and
allowing the user to instantly undo changes to prevent other people catching sight of his
screen and then re-apply changes after the boss has left the room. She was followed by
Juan Carlos Rivera who described work on emergency management, especially
scheduling disaster relief supplies.
The conference was concluded by Alejandro Lopez Rincon describing inferring
problems with the human heart from skin voltage measurements taken by an array of
electrical contacts on the chest and back and Piero Consoli and Mario Pavone’s paper
on partitioning networks.

November 2013 W.B. Langdon

1
Who have given their presentations.
 Preface

This LNCS volume includes the best papers presented at the 11th Biennial International
Conference on Artificial Evolution, EA2 2013, held in Bordeaux (France). Previous EA
editions took place in Angers (2011), Strasbourg (2009), Tours (2007), Lille (2005),
Marseille (2003), Le Creusot (2001), Dunkerque (1999), Nimes (1997), Brest (1995),
and Toulouse (1994).
Authors had been invited to present original work relevant to Artificial Evolution,
including, but not limited to: Evolutionary Computation, Evolutionary Optimization,
Co-evolution, Artificial Life, Population Dynamics, Theory, Algorithmics and Mod-
eling, Implementations, Application of Evolutionary Paradigms to the Real World
(industry, biosciences, …), other Biologically Inspired Paradigms (Swarm, Artificial
Ants, Artificial Immune Systems, Cultural Algorithms…), Memetic Algorithms, Multi-
Objective Optimization, Constraint Handling, Parallel Algorithms, Dynamic Optimi-
zation, Machine Learning, and hybridization with other soft computing techniques.
Each submitted paper was reviewed by four members of the International Program
Committee. Among the 39 submissions received, 20 papers were selected for oral
presentation and 2 other papers for poster presentation. For the previous editions, a
selection of the best papers which were presented at the conference and further revised
were published (see LNCS volumes 1063, 1363, 1829, 2310, 2936, 3871, 4926, 5975,
and 7401). Exceptionally, for this edition, the high quality of the 20 papers selected for
the oral presentation led us to include a revised version of all these paper in this volume
of Springer’s LNCS series.
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to our invited speakers: Jean-Louis
Deneubourg and William Langdon.
The success of the conference resulted from the input of many people to whom
I would like to express my appreciation: The members of Program Committee and the
secondary reviewers for their careful reviews that ensure the quality of the selected
papers and of the conference. The members of the Organizing Committee for their
efficient work and dedication assisted by Laetitia Grimaldi, Nicolas Jahier, Cathy
Metivier, and Ingrid Rochel. The members of the Steering Committee for their valuable
assistance. Aurélien Dumez for his support on the administration of the website.
Mélanie Toto for the design and the visual identity of the conference. Marc Schoenauer
for his support with the MyReview system. Laetitia Jourdan, Lola Kovacic, and Marion
Bachelet for the publicity. Marc-Michel Corsini for the edition of the proceedings.
Sebastien Verel for the registrations. Evelyne Lutton and Nicolas Monmarché for the
organization of the Side Event: “Art and Artificial Evolution,” and the artists. Laurent
Vezard for his support.

2
As for previous editions of the conference, the EA acronym is based on the original French name
“Évolution Artificielle.”
X Preface

I take this opportunity to thank the different partners whose financial and material
support contributed to the organization of the conference: Université Bordeaux 1,
Université Bordeaux Segalen, Région Aquitaine, La CUB, CNRS, IMB, Inria, UFR
Sciences et Modélisation.
Last but not least, I thank all the authors who submitted their research papers to the
conference, and the authors of accepted papers who attended the conference to present
their work. Thank you all.

October 2013 Pierrick Legrand

 Evolution Artificielle 2013 – EA 2013

October 21–23, 2013

Bordeaux, France
11th International Conference on Artificial Evolution

Program Committee
Sebastien Aupetit Université de Tours, France
Nicolas Bredeche Université Pierre et Marie Curie, France
Stefano Cagnoni Universita di Parma, Italy
Pierre Collet Université de Strasbourg, France
Marc-Michel Corsini Université de Bordeaux, France
Benjamin Doerr Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Germany
Nicolas Durand IRIT, France
Marc Ebner Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald,
Germany
Cyril Fonlupt ULCO, France
Christian Gagné Université Laval, Canada
Edgar Galvan Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Mario Giacobini University of Turin, Italy
Jens Gottlieb SAP AG, Germany
Eric Grivel IMS, France
Jin-Kao Hao Université d’Angers, France
Colin Johnson University of Kent, UK
Laetitia Jourdan LIFL, France
Pierrick Legrand Université de Bordeaux, France
Jean Louchet Ghent University, Belgium
Evelyne Lutton INRA-AgroParisTech, France
Virginie Marion-Poty LISIC, ULCO, France
Nicolas Monmarché University of Tours, France
Jean-Marc Montanier CRAB Team, NTNU, Norway
Gabriela Ochoa University of Stirling, UK
Denis Robilliard LISIC, ULCO, France
Eduardo Rodriguez-Tello CINVESTAV, Tamaulipas, Mexico
Frédéric Saubion Université d’Angers, France
Marc Schoenauer Inria Saclay, France
Patrick Siarry Université Paris-Est Créteil, France
Christine Solnon Université Lyon 1, France
Thomas Stuetzle Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgique
El-Ghazali Talbi University of Lille, France
Olivier Teytaud TAO, Inria, France
Fabien Teytaud LISIC, France
XII Evolution Artificielle 2013 – EA 2013

Alberto Tonda UMR 782 GMPA INRA, France

José Torres-Jiménez CINVESTAV, Tamaulipas, Mexico
Leonardo Trujillo ITT, Mexico
Shigeyoshi Tsutsui Hannan University, Japan
Paulo Urbano University of Lisbon, Portugal
Gilles Venturini University of Tours, France
Sébastien Verel ULCO, France
Laurent Vezard CQFD, Inria, France

Steering Committee
Pierre Collet Université Louis Pasteur de Strasbourg, France
Jin-Kao Hao Université d’Angers, France
Evelyne Lutton INRA, France
Nicolas Monmarché Université François Rabelais de Tours, France
Marc Schoenauer Inria, France

Organizing Committee

Marc-Michel Corsini (LNCS Publication, Proceedings)

Aurelien Dumez (Admin Web)
Laetitia Grimaldi (Local Organization)
Nicolas Jahier (Local Organization)
Laetitia Jourdan (Publicity)
Pierrick Legrand (General Chair, LNCS Publication, Proceedings)
Ingrid Rochel (Local Organization)
Marc Schoenauer (Submissions, MyReview)
Mélanie Toto (Webdesigner)
Sébastien Vérel (Treasurer)
Laurent Vezard (Local Organization)
 Evolution Artificielle 2013 – EA 2013 XIII

Invited Speakers

Jean Louis Deneubourg, Université libre de Bruxelles

Exploring animal collective behaviors
Jean-Louis Deneubourg is a FNRS researcher and the director of the Social Ecology
Department (Faculté des Sciences ULB). He is a member of the Royal Academy of
Belgium. His research activities are oriented toward collectives behaviors in animal
societies and artificial systems. He has written 300 publications on these topics.

William B. Langdon, University College London, Department of Computer Science

Genetic Improvement Programming
Bill Langdon gained his PhD at Univer-
sity College, London after a career in
industrial control software and IT con-
sulting. He has held positions in univer-
sities and research institutes both in
England and overseas. Recently, he has
applied genetic programming to optimiz-
ing software. He has written three books
on genetic programming, including A
Field Guide to Genetic Programming
and maintains the Genetic Programming
Bibliography.
XIV Evolution Artificielle 2013 – EA 2013

Side Event

Evolutionary Artworks Exhibition – October 21, 2013, 17h45

This exhibition, open to the public, displayed a series of artworks created by artists
and researchers using approaches based on artificial evolution.
The “biodiversity” of evo-artists was illustrated by works of a dozen different authors.
Some of them were on place for discussions, and an interactive design show was
presented by the artist Emmanuel Cayla. An electronic artworks catalog is available
on the conference website.
http://ea2013.inria.fr//EA2013-catalogue_side-event_A3.pdf

Organization and Contact:

– Evelyne Lutton (evelyne.lutton@grignon.inra.fr)
– Nicolas Monmarché (nicolas.monmarche@univ-tours.fr)
 Contents

Theory

What Makes an Instance Difficult for Black-Box 0–1 Evolutionary

Multiobjective Optimizers?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Arnaud Liefooghe, Sébastien Verel, Hernán Aguirre, and Kiyoshi Tanaka

Log-log Convergence for Noisy Optimization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

S. Astete-Morales, J. Liu, and Olivier Teytaud

Preventing Premature Convergence and Proving the Optimality

in Evolutionary Algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Charlie Vanaret, Jean-Baptiste Gotteland, Nicolas Durand,
and Jean-Marc Alliot

Local Optima Networks of the Permutation Flow-Shop Problem . . . . . . . . . . 41

Fabio Daolio, Sébastien Verel, Gabriela Ochoa, and Marco Tomassini

Linear Convergence of Evolution Strategies with Derandomized

Sampling Beyond Quasi-Convex Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Jérémie Decock and Olivier Teytaud

Ant Colony Optimization

Effective Multi-caste Ant Colony System for Large Dynamic Traveling

Salesperson Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Leonor Melo, Francisco Pereira, and Ernesto Costa

Beam-ACO for the Repetition-Free Longest Common Subsequence Problem . . . 79

Christian Blum, Maria J. Blesa, and Borja Calvo

Applications

Medium-Voltage Distribution Network Expansion Planning with Gene-pool

Optimal Mixing Evolutionary Algorithms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Hoang N. Luong, Marinus O.W. Grond, Peter A.N. Bosman,
and Han La Poutré

Preliminary Studies on Biclustering of GWA: A Multiobjective Approach . . . 106

Khedidja Seridi, Laetitia Jourdan, and El-Ghazali Talbi

An Evolutionary Approach to Contrast Compensation for Dichromat Users. . . . 118

A. Mereuta, S. Aupetit, N. Monmarché, and M. Slimane
XVI Contents

Multistart Evolutionary Local Search for a Disaster Relief Problem . . . . . . . . 129

Juan Carlos Rivera, H. Murat Afsar, and Christian Prins

Combinatorial and Discrete Optimization

Improving the Louvain Algorithm for Community Detection

with Modularity Maximization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Olivier Gach and Jin-Kao Hao

A Recombination-Based Tabu Search Algorithm for the Winner

Determination Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
Ines Sghir, Jin-Kao Hao, Ines Ben Jaafar, and Khaled Ghédira

Improving Efficiency of Metaheuristics for Cellular Automaton

Inverse Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
Fazia Aboud, Nathalie Grangeon, and Sylvie Norre

Memetic Algorithms

Memetic Algorithm with an Efficient Split Procedure for the Team

Orienteering Problem with Time Windows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Rym Nesrine Guibadj and Aziz Moukrim

Genetic Programming

Learning Selection Strategies for Evolutionary Algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

Nuno Lourenço, Francisco B. Pereira, and Ernesto Costa

Interactive Evolution

Balancing User Interaction and Control in BNSL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

Alberto Tonda, Andre Spritzer, and Evelyne Lutton

Parallel Evolutionary Algorithms

Massively Parallel Generational GA on GPGPU Applied to Power

Load Profiles Determination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
Frédéric Krüger, Daniel Wagner, and Pierre Collet

Swarm Intelligence

O-BEE-COL: Optimal BEEs for COLoring Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

Piero Consoli and Mario Pavone
 Contents XVII

PSO with Tikhonov Regularization for the Inverse Problem

in Electrocardiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
Alejandro Lopez, Miguel Cienfuegos, Bedreddine Ainseba,
and Mostafa Bendahmane

Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

Theory
What Makes an Instance Difficult for Black-Box
0–1 Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimizers?

Arnaud Liefooghe1,2(B) , Sébastien Verel3 , Hernán Aguirre4 ,

and Kiyoshi Tanaka4
1
LIFL (UMR CNRS 8022), Université Lille 1,
Villeneuve d’Ascq, France
2
Dolphin, Inria Lille-Nord Europe, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France
arnaud.liefooghe@univ-lille1.fr
3
LISIC, Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale, Calais, France
verel@lisic.univ-littoral.fr
4
Faculty of Engineering, Shinshu University, Nagano, Japan
{ahernan,ktanaka}@shinshu-u.ac.jp

Abstract. This paper investigates the correlation between the charac-

teristics extracted from the problem instance and the performance of a
simple evolutionary multiobjective optimization algorithm. First, a num-
ber of features are identified and measured on a large set of enumerable
multiobjective NK-landscapes with objective correlation. A correlation
analysis is conducted between those attributes, including low-level fea-
tures extracted from the problem input data as well as high-level features
extracted from the Pareto set, the Pareto graph and the fitness land-
scape. Second, we experimentally analyze the (estimated) running time
of the global SEMO algorithm to identify a (1 + ε)-approximation of the
Pareto set. By putting this performance measure in relation with prob-
lem instance features, we are able to explain the difficulties encountered
by the algorithm with respect to the main instance characteristics.

1 Introduction
In single-objective black-box combinatorial optimization, fitness landscape analy-
sis aims at apprehending the relation between the geometry of a problem instance
and the dynamics of randomized search algorithms. Understanding the main
problem-related features allows to explain the behavior and the performance
of such algorithms, the ultimate goal being to predict this performance and
adapt the algorithm setting to the instance being solved. Recently, the perfor-
mance of single-objective randomized search algorithms has been correlated to
fitness landscape features [2]. In this paper, we propose a general methodology
to analyze the correlation between problem features and algorithm performance
in black-box 0–1 evolutionary multiobjective optimization. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first time that such an analysis is conducted in multiob-
jective optimization.


c Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
P. Legrand et al. (Eds.): EA 2013, LNCS 8752, pp. 3–15, 2014.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-11683-9 1
4 A. Liefooghe et al.

We first identify a number of existing and original multiobjective problem

features. They include low-level features extracted from the problem input data
like variable correlation, objective correlation, and objective space dimension,
as well as high-level features from the Pareto set, the Pareto graph and the
ruggedness and multimodality of the fitness landscape. Some of them are here
proposed for the first time. They consist of a simple autocorrelation function,
based on a local hypervolume measure, and allowing to estimate the ruggedness
of the fitness landscape. We report all these measures on a large number of
enumerable multiobjective NK-landscapes with objective correlation (ρMNK-
landscapes), together with a correlation analysis between them.
Next, we conduct an experimental analysis on the correlation between
instance features and algorithm performance. To do so, we investigate the esti-
mated running time of a simple evolutionary multiobjective optimization algo-
rithm, namely global SEMO [7], to identify a (1 + ε)-approximation of the
Pareto set. In particular, the original hypervolume-based autocorrelation func-
tions appear to be the features with the highest correlation with the algorithm
performance. Overall, the running time of the algorithm is impacted by each
of the identified multiobjective problem feature. Our analysis shows their rel-
ative importance on the algorithm efficiency. Moreover, taking the features all
together allows to better explain the dynamics of randomized search algorithms.
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 details the background infor-
mation related to fitness landscape analysis, multiobjective optimization and
ρMNK-landscapes. In Sect. 3, low-level and high-level instance features are iden-
tified, and quantitative results, together with a correlation analysis, are reported
for ρMNK-landscapes. Section 4 presents the experimental setup of global SEMO
and discusses the correlation between the problem features and the estimated
running time of global SEMO. Section 5 concludes the paper and discusses fur-
ther research.

2 Preliminaries
2.1 Fitness Landscape Analysis
In single-objective optimization, fitness landscape analysis allows to study the
topology of a combinatorial optimization problem [13], by gathering important
information such as ruggedness or multimodality. A fitness landscape is defined
by a triplet (X, N , φ), where X is a set of admissible solutions (the search space),
N : X → 2X is a neighborhood relation, and φ : X → IR is a (scalar) fitness
function, here assumed to be maximized. A walk over the fitness landscape is
an ordered sequence x0 , x1 , . . . , x  of solutions from the search space such that
x0 ∈ X, and xt ∈ N (xt−1 ) for all t ∈ {1, . . . , }.
An adaptive walk is a walk such that for all t ∈ {1, . . . , }, φ(xt ) > φ(xt−1 ), as
performed by a conventional hill-climbing algorithm. The number of iterations,
or steps, of the hill-climbing algorithm is the length of the adaptive walk. This
length is a good estimator of the average diameter of the local optima basins
of attraction, characterizing a problem instance multimodality. The larger the
 What Makes an Instance Difficult for Black-Box 0–1 Optimizers? 5

length, the larger the basin diameter. This allows to estimate the number of local
optima when the whole search space cannot be enumerated exhaustively.
Let x0 , x1 , . . . be an infinite random walk over the search space. The auto-
correlation function and the correlation length of such a random walk allow to
measure the ruggedness of a fitness landscape [13]. The random walk autocorre-
lation function r : N → IR of a (scalar) fitness function φ is defined as follows.

E[φ(xt ) · φ(xt+k )] − E[φ(xt )] · E[φ(xt+k )]

r(k) = (1)
Var(φ(xt ))

where E[φ(xt )] and Var(φ(xt )) are the expected value and the variance of φ(xt ),
respectively. The autocorrelation coefficients r(k) can be estimated within a
finite random walk x0 , x1 , . . . , x  of length .
−k
t=1 (φ(xt ) − φ̄) · (φ(xt+k ) − φ̄)
r̂(k) =  (2)
t=1 (φ(xt ) − φ̄)
2


where φ̄ = 1 t=1 φ(xt ), and   0. The estimation error diminishes with the
walk length . The correlation length τ measures how the autocorrelation func-
tion decreases. This characterizes the ruggedness of the landscape: the larger the
correlation length, the smoother the landscape. Following [13], we define the cor-
relation length by τ = − ln(r(1))
1
, making the assumption that the autocorrelation
function decreases exponentially.

2.2 Multiobjective Optimization

A multiobjective optimization problem can be defined by an objective vector
function f = (f1 , . . . , fM ) with M  2 objective functions, and a set X of
feasible solutions in the decision space. In the combinatorial case, X is a discrete
set. Let Z = f (X) ⊆ IRM be the set of feasible outcome vectors in the objective
space. To each solution x ∈ X is assigned an objective vector z ∈ Z on the
basis of the vector function f : X → Z with z = f (x). The conventional Pareto
dominance relation is defined as follows. In a maximization context, an objective
vector z ∈ Z is dominated by an objective vector z  ∈ Z, denoted by z ≺ z  , if
 
and only if ∀m ∈ {1, . . . , M }, zm  zm and ∃m ∈ {1, . . . , M } such that zm < zm .

By extension, a solution x ∈ X is dominated by a solution x ∈ X, denoted by
x ≺ x , if and only if f (x) ≺ f (x ). A solution x ∈ X is said to be Pareto
optimal (or efficient, non-dominated), if and only if there does not exist any
other solution x ∈ X such that x ≺ x. The set of all Pareto optimal solutions
is called the Pareto set X  ⊆ X. Its mapping in the objective space is called
the Pareto front Z  ⊆ Z. One of the most challenging task in multiobjective
optimization is to identify a minimal complete Pareto set [3], i.e. a Pareto set
of minimal size, that is one Pareto optimal solution for each point from the
Pareto front.
However, in the combinatorial case, generating a complete Pareto set is often
infeasible for two main reasons [3]: (i) the number of Pareto optimal solutions is
6 A. Liefooghe et al.

typically exponential in the size of the problem instance, and (ii) deciding if a
feasible solution belongs to the Pareto set may be NP-complete. Therefore, the
overall goal is often to identify a good Pareto set approximation. To this end,
heuristics in general, and evolutionary algorithms in particular, have received a
growing interest since the late eighties.

2.3 ρMNK-Landscapes

The family of ρMNK-landscapes constitutes a problem-independent model used

for constructing multiobjective multimodal landscapes with objective correla-
tion [12]. It extends single-objective NK-landscapes [6] and multiobjective NK-
landscapes with independent objective functions [1]. Feasible solutions are binary
strings of size N , i.e. the decision space is X = {0, 1}N . The parameter N refers
to the problem size (the bit-string length), and the parameter K to the number
of variables that influence a particular position from the bit-string (the epistatic
interactions). The objective vector function f = (f1 , . . . , fm , . . . , fM ) is defined
as f : {0, 1}N → [0, 1)M . Each objective function fm is to be maximized and
can be formalized as follows.
N
1  m
fm (x) = c (xi , xi1 , . . . , xiK ), m ∈ {1, . . . , M } (3)
N i=1 i

where cm i : {0, 1}
K+1
→ [0, 1) defines the multidimensional component function
associated with each variable xi , i ∈ {1, . . . , N }, and where K < N . By increas-
ing the number of variable interactions K from 0 to (N − 1), ρMNK-landscapes
can be gradually tuned from smooth to rugged. In this work, we set the posi-
tion of these epistatic interactions uniformly at random. The same epistatic
degree Km = K and the same epistatic interactions are used for all objectives
m ∈ {1, . . . , M }. Component values are uniformly distributed in the range [0, 1),
and follow a multivariate uniform distribution of dimension M , defined by a cor-
relation coefficient ρ > M−1 −1 , i.e. the same correlation ρ is defined between all
pairs of objective functions. As a consequence, it is very unlikely that the same
objective vector is assigned to two different solutions. The positive (respectively
negative) data correlation allows to decrease (respectively increases) the degree
of conflict between the objective function values very precisely [12]. An instance
generator and the problem instances under study in this paper can be found at
the following URL: http://mocobench.sf.net/.
In the following, we investigate ρMNK-landscapes with an epistatic degree
K ∈ {2, 4, 6, 8, 10}, an objective space dimension M ∈ {2, 3, 5}, and an objective
correlation ρ ∈ {−0.9, −0.7, −0.4, −0.2, 0.0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.7, 0.9} such that ρ > M−1
−1 .
The problem size is set to N = 18 in order to enumerate the search space
exhaustively. The search space size is then |X| = 218 . 30 different landscapes,
independently generated at random, are considered for each parameter combi-
nation: ρ, M , and K. This leads to a total of 3300 problem instances.
 What Makes an Instance Difficult for Black-Box 0–1 Optimizers? 7

3 Problem Features and Correlation Analysis

In this section, we identify a number of general-purpose features, either directly
extracted from the problem instance itself (low-level features), or computed from
the enumerated Pareto set and from the fitness landscape (high-level features).
Then, a correlation analysis is conducted on those features in order to highlight
the main similarities in characterizing the difficulties of a problem instance.

3.1 Low-Level Features from Problem Input Data

First, we consider some features related to the definition of ρMNK-landscapes.

Number of epistatic interactions (K): This gives the number of variable
correlations in the construction of ρMNK-landscapes. As will be detailed
later, despite the K-value can generally not be retrieved directly from an
unknown instance, it can be precisely estimated within some high-level fit-
ness landscape metrics described below.
Number of objective functions (M): This parameter represents the dimen-
sion of the objective space in the construction of ρMNK-landscapes.
Objective correlation (ρ): This parameter allows to tune the correlation
between the objective function values in ρMNK-landscapes. In our analy-
sis, the objective correlation is the same between all pairs of objectives.

3.2 High-Level Features from the Pareto Set

The high-level fitness landscape metrics considered in our analysis are described
below. We start with some general features related to the Pareto set.

Number of Pareto optimal solutions (npo): The number of Pareto optimal

solutions enumerated in the instance under consideration simply corresponds
to the cardinality of the (exact) Pareto set, i.e. npo = |X  |. The approx-
imation set manipulated by any EMO algorithm is directly related to the
cardinality of the Pareto optimal set. For ρMNK-landscapes, the number
of Pareto optimal solutions typically grows exponentially with the problem
size, the number of objectives and with the degree of conflict between the
objectives [12].
Hypervolume (hv): The hypervolume value of a the Pareto set X  gives the
portion of the objective space that is dominated by X  [14]. We take the
origin as a reference point z  = (0.0, . . . , 0.0).
Average distance between Pareto optimal solutions (avgd): This metric
corresponds to the average distance, in terms of Hamming distance, between
any pair of Pareto optimal solutions.
Maximum distance between Pareto optimal solutions (maxd): This met-
ric is the maximum distance between two Pareto optimal solutions in terms
of Hamming distance.
8 A. Liefooghe et al.

3.3 High-Level Features from the Pareto Graph

In the following, we describe some high-level features related to the connectedness

of the Pareto set [4]. If all Pareto optimal solutions are connected with respect
to a given neighborhood structure, the Pareto set is said to be connected, and
local search algorithms would be able to identify many non-dominated solutions
by starting with at least one Pareto optimal solution; see e.g. [9,10]. We follow
the definition of k-Pareto graph from [9]. The k-Pareto graph is defined as a
graph P Gk = (V, E), where the set of vertices V contains all Pareto optimal
solutions, and there is an edge eij ∈ E between two nodes i and j if and only
if the shortest distance between solutions xi and xj ∈ X is below a bound k,
i.e. d(xi , xj )  k. The distance d(xi , xj ) is taken as the Hamming distance for
ρMNK-landscapes. This corresponds to the bit-flip neighborhood operator. Some
connectedness-related high-level features under investigation are given below.

Number of connected components (nconnec): This metric gives the number

of connected components in the 1-Pareto graph, i.e. in P Gk with k = 1.
Size of the largest connected component (lconnec): This corresponds to
the size of the largest connected component in the 1-Pareto graph P G1 .
Minimum distance to be connected (kconnec): This measure corresponds
to the smallest distance k such that the k-Pareto graph is connected, i.e.
for all pairs of vertices xi , xj ∈ V in P Gk , there exists and edge eij ∈ E.

3.4 High-Level Features from the Fitness Landscape

At last, we give some high-level metrics related to the number of local optima,
the length of adaptive walks, and the autocorrelation functions.

Number of Pareto local optima (nplo): A solution x ∈ X is a Pareto

local optimum with respect to a neighborhood structure N if there does not
exist any neighboring solution x ∈ N (x) such that x ≺ x ; see e.g. [11].
For ρMNK-landscapes, the neighborhood structure is taken as the 1-bit-flip,
which is directly related to a Hamming distance 1. This metric reports the
number of Pareto local optima enumerated on the ρMNK-landscape under
consideration.
Length of a Pareto-based adaptive walk (ladapt): We here compute the
length of adaptive walks by means of a very basic single solution-based
Pareto-based Hill-Climbing (PHC) algorithm. The PHC algorithm is ini-
tialized with a random solution. At each iteration, the current solution is
replaced by a random dominating neighboring solution. As a consequence,
PHC stops on a Pareto local optimum. The number of iterations, or steps,
of the PHC algorithm is the length of the Pareto-based adaptive walk. As
in the single-objective case, the number of Pareto local optima is expected
to increase exponentially when the adaptive length decreases for ρMNK-
landscapes [12].
 What Makes an Instance Difficult for Black-Box 0–1 Optimizers? 9

2.0 4.5 0 6 2 8 0 800 2 8 0 4 8 0.2 0.7

−0.22 0.60 0.56 0.32 −0.35 0.45 0.31 −0.34 −1.00 −0.97

6
K −9.9e−22 0.00 −0.082

2
4.5

M 0.26 0.57 0.90 0.13 −0.23 0.39 0.53 −0.34 0.35 −0.39 −0.025 0.085
2.0

ρ −0.49 0.06 −0.25 0.17 −0.22 −0.35 0.24 −0.67 0.64 0.0085 0.12

−0.5
6

log_npo 0.67 0.28 −0.40 0.59 0.90 −0.57 0.81 −0.81 0.065 0.075
0

hv 0.04 −0.41 0.32 0.64 −0.50 0.41 −0.44 0.19 0.25

−0.7
8

avgd 0.58 0.24 0.021 0.49 0.56 −0.58 −0.60 −0.59

2

8
maxd −0.17 −0.49 0.89 −0.086 0.068 −0.55 −0.55

2
800

nconnec 0.44 −0.28 0.48 −0.48 −0.33 −0.29

0

6
log_lconnec −0.64 0.61 −0.59 0.34 0.33

0
8

kconnec −0.27 0.25 −0.44 −0.44

2

log_nplo
−1.00 −0.33 −0.34

4 8
8

0.36 0.36
4

ladapt
0

0.8
corhv 0.97

0.4
0.2 0.7

corlhv

2 6 −0.5 −0.7 2 8 0 6 4 8 0.4 0.8

Fig. 1. Correlation matrix between all pairs of features. The feature names are reported
on the diagonal. For each pair of features, scatter plots and smoothing splines are dis-
played below the diagonal, and the corresponding correlation coefficients are reported
above the diagonal. The smoothing spline is a smoothing method that fits a smooth
curve to a set of noisy observations using a spline function. The correlation coefficient
is based on a Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient measuring the linear cor-
relation (dependence) between both features. Correlation coefficient values lie between
−1 (total negative correlation) and +1 (total positive correlation), while 0 means no
correlation.

Correlation length of solution hypervolume (corhv): The ruggedness is

here measured in terms of the autocorrelation of the hypervolume along a
random walk. As explained in Sect. 2.1, the correlation length τ measures
how the autocorrelation function, estimated with a random walk, decreases.
The autocorrelation coefficients are here computed with the following scalar
fitness function φ : X → IR: φ(x) = hv({x}), where hv({x}) is the hyper-
10 A. Liefooghe et al.

volume of solution x ∈ X, the reference point being set to the origin. The
random walk length is set to  = 104 , and the neighborhood is the 1-bit-flip.
Correlation length of local hypervolume (corlhv): This metric is similar
to the previous one, except that the fitness function is here based on a local
hypervolume measure. The local hypervolume is the portion of the objective
space covered by non-dominated neighboring solutions, i.e. for all x ∈ X,
φ(x) = hv(N (x) ∪ {x}). Similarly to corhv, the random walk length is set
to  = 104 , and the neighborhood operator N is the 1-bit-flip.

3.5 Correlation Analysis

The correlation matrix between each pair of fea-

10
tures is reported in Fig. 1. First of all, when

8
taken independently, the number of objective
functions M and the objective correlation ρ are

6
log(npo)
both moderately correlated to the cardinality of

4
the Pareto set npo (the absolute correlation coef-

2
ficient is around 0.5 in both cases). Surprisingly,
the objective space dimension does not explain 0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7

(beta_1 x M) + (beta_2 x rho) + e

by itself the large amount of non-dominated

solutions found in many-objective optimization. Fig. 2. Scatter plot of the
As pointed out in [12], this should be put in linear regression model
relation with the degree of conflicts between the log(npo) = β1 M + β2 ρ + e, with
objective function values. Indeed, as shown in β1 = 1.30567, β2 = −2.87688,
Fig. 2, it is easy to build a simple multi-linear and e = 0.27735. Residual
standard error: 1.037 on 3297
regression model based on M and ρ to pre-
degrees of freedom, multiple
dict the value of npo with a very high precision R-squared: 0.7629, adjusted
(resulting in a correlation coefficient of 0.87, and R-squared: 0.7627, F-statistic:
explaining 76 % of the variance). This highlights 5303 on 2 and 3297 DF, p-value:
that the impact of many-objective fitness land- < 2.2e − 16.
scapes on the search process cannot be analyzed
properly without taking the objective correlation into account.
Interestingly, other important remarks can be extracted from the figure. With
respect to the Pareto set, the hypervolume value increases with the objective
space dimension. Moreover, and unsurprisingly, the Pareto set size and the size
of the largest connected component from the Pareto graph are highly correlated.
So are the maximum distance between Pareto optimal solutions and the mini-
mum distance for the Pareto set to be connected. As also reported in [12], there
is a high correlation between the number of Pareto optimal solutions npo and
of Pareto local optima nplo. More importantly, the number of Pareto local
optima nplo can be precisely estimated with the length of a Pareto-based adap-
tive walk ladapt (the absolute correlation coefficient between log(nplo) and
ladapt is 1). As a consequence, this allows to estimate the size of the Pareto
set as well. At last, the number of epistatic interactions (decision variable corre-
lations) K can be estimated with hypervolume-based autocorrelation functions
along a random walk corhv and corlhv. Since there is not much difference
 What Makes an Instance Difficult for Black-Box 0–1 Optimizers? 11

Algorithm 1. Pseudo-code of G-SEMO

Input: x0 ∈ X
Output: Archive A
1: A ← x0
2: loop
3: select x from A at random
4: create x by flipping each bit of x with a probability 1/N
5: A ← non-dominated solutions from A ∪ {x }
6: end loop

between the correlations coefficients of both functions, the first one corhv should
preferably be considered due to its simplicity. Notice that a similar analysis
involving instances with the same number of objectives resulted in comparable
results.

4 Problem Features vs. Algorithm Performance

4.1 Experimental Setup

Global SEMO. Global SEMO (G-SEMO for short) [7] is a simple elitist
steady-state EMO algorithm for black-box 0–1 optimization problems dealing
N
with an arbitrary objective vector function defined as f : {0, 1} → Z such
M
that Z ⊆ IR , like ρMNK-landscapes. A pseudo-code is given in Algorithm 1.
It maintains an unbounded archive A of non-dominated solutions found so far.
The archive is initialized with one random solution from the search space. At
each iteration, one solution is chosen at random from the archive. Each bit of
this solution is independently flipped with a rate r = 1/N , and the obtained
solution is checked for insertion in the archive. Within such an independent bit-
flip mutation, any solution from the search space can potentially be reached by
applying the mutation operator to any arbitrary solution. In its general form, the
G-SEMO algorithm does not have any explicit stopping rule [7]. In this paper,
we are interested in its running time, in terms of a number of function evalua-
tions, until an (1 + ε)-approximation of the Pareto set has been identified and
is contained in the internal memory A of the algorithm, subject to a maximum
number of function evaluations.

Performance Evaluation. For any constant value ε  0, the (multiplicative)

ε-dominance relation ε can be defined as follows. For all z, z  ∈ Z, z ε z  if

and only if zm · (1 + ε)  zm , ∀m ∈ {1, . . . , M }. Similarly, for all x, x ∈ X,
x ε x if and only if f (x) ε f (x ). Let ε  0. A set X ε ⊆ X is an (1 + ε)-


approximation of the Pareto set if and only if, for any solution x ∈ X, there is
one solution x ∈ X ε such that x ε x . This is equivalent of finding a Pareto set
approximation whose multiplicative epsilon quality indicator value with respect
to the exact Pareto set is (1 + ε), see e.g. [14]. Interestingly, under some general
12 A. Liefooghe et al.

assumptions, there always exists an (1 + ε)-approximation, for any given ε  0,

whose cardinality is both polynomial in the problem size and in 1/ε [8].
Following a conventional methodology from single-objective continuous black-
box optimization benchmarking [5], the expected number of function evaluations
to identify an (1 + ε)-approximation is chosen as a performance measure. How-
ever, as any EMO algorithm, G-SEMO can either succeed or fail to reach an
accuracy of ε in a single simulation run. In case of a success, the runtime is the
number of function evaluations until an (1+ε)-approximation was found. In case
of a failure, we simply restart the algorithm at random. We then obtain a “sim-
ulated runtime” [5] from a set of given trials of G-SEMO on a given instance.
Such a performance measure allows to take into account both the success rate
ps ∈ (0, 1] and the convergence speed of the G-SEMO algorithm. Indeed, after
(n − 1) failures, each one requiring Tf evaluations, and the final successful run
n−1
with Ts evaluations, the total runtime is T = i=1 Tf + Ts . By taking the
expectation value and by considering that the probability of success after (n − 1)
failures follows a Bernoulli distribution of parameter ps , we have:
 
1 − ps
E[T ] = E[Tf ] + E[Ts ] (4)
ps

In our case, the success rate ps is estimated with the ratio of successful runs over
the total number of executions (pˆs ), the expected runtime for unsuccessful runs
E[Tf ] is set to a constant function evaluation limit Tmax , and the expected run-
time for successful runs E[Ts ] is estimated with the average number of function
evaluations performed by successful runs.
  Ns
1 − p̂s 1 
ert = Tmax + Ti (5)
p̂s Ns i=1

where Ns is the number of successful runs, and Ti is the number of evaluations

required for successful run i. For more details, we refer to [5].

Parameter Setting. In our analysis, we set ε = 0.1. The time limit is set
to Tmax = 2N /10 < 26215 function evaluations without identifying an (1 + ε)-
approximation. The G-SEMO algorithm is executed 100 times per instance. For
a given instance, the success rate and the expected number of evaluations for
successful runs are estimated from those 100 executions. However, let us note
that G-SEMO was not able to identify a (1 + ε)-approximation set for any of
the runs on one instance with M = 3, ρ = 0.2 and K = 10, one instance with
M = 3, ρ = 0.4 and K = 10, ten instances with M = 5, ρ = 0.2 and K = 10,
six instances with M = 5, ρ = 0.4 and K = 10, as well as two instances with
M = 5, ρ = 0.7 and K = 10. Moreover, G-SEMO was not able to solve the
following instances due to an overload CPU resources available: M = 5 and
ρ ∈ {−0.2, 0.0}. Overall, this represents a total amount of 2980 instances times
100 executions, that is 298000 simulation runs.
 What Makes an Instance Difficult for Black-Box 0–1 Optimizers? 13

K M ρ log_npo hv avgd maxd nconnec log_lconnec kconnec log_nplo ladapt corhv corlhv

0.85 0.21 0.035 0.077 −0.036 0.60 0.47 0.35 −0.28 0.37 0.46 −0.50 −0.85 −0.78

12
4
2 8 −0.5 −0.7 2 10 0 4 4 10 0.4
2.0 4.5 0 4 2 10 0 400 2 10 0 4 8 0.2 0.8

Fig. 3. Correlation between log(ert) and each feature. The feature names are reported
on the first line, correlation coefficients are reported on the second line, and scatter
plots as well as smoothing splines are displayed on the third line.

4.2 Computational Results

The correlation between each feature and the running time of G-SEMO is
reported in Fig. 3. First, with respect to low-level features, there exists a high
correlation between log(ert) and K, which is the highest absolute correlation
observed on our data. However, surprisingly, the correlation of the performance
measure with M and ρ is not significant. Second, with respect to high-level
features from the Pareto set, the size of the Pareto set and its hypervolume
does not explain the variance of log(ert). Nevertheless, the larger the distance
between Pareto optimal solutions in the decision space, the larger the running
time of G-SEMO. Similarly, when the Pareto graph is close to a fully connected
graph, G-SEMO is likely to take less time to identify a (1+ε)-approximation (the
absolute correlation value is around 0.3). As a consequence, the number of Pareto
optimal solutions has a smaller impact on the performance of G-SEMO than the
structure existing between those solutions in the decision space.
With respect to high-level fitness landscape features, the number of Pareto
local optima nplo and its estimator ladapt both present a significant correlation
with the estimated running time of G-SEMO. Indeed, the more Pareto local
optima, the longer the running time (the absolute correlation value is close to
0.5). At last, the hypervolume-based autocorrelation functions highly explain
the variance of the G-SEMO performance. For both corhv and corlhv, the
absolute correlation value is around 0.8. Overall, this correlation analysis gives
a “big picture” of a well-suited multiobjective fitness landscape for G-SEMO.
This corroborates the impact of the problem instance properties identified in the
previous section on the performance of multiobjective evolutionary algorithms.

5 Discussion

In this paper, we attempted to give a first step towards a better understanding of

the evolutionary multiobjective optimization algorithm performance according
to the main characteristics of the problem instance. We first presented a number
of general problem features, together with a correlation analysis between those
features on a large set of enumerable multiobjective NK-landscapes. Then, we
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 But, better yet, four of the happiest weeks of his life were
subsequently spent in that same hospital to which he had first been
taken relating to all and sundry his amazing adventure, he being
interviewed by no less than five representatives of Sunday editors
and eleven reporters for city dailies, all anxious to discover just how
it was that he had been blown through water and air up through so
great a thing as a river, and how he felt while en route. A triumph.
Rivers may be smart, but saints are smarter, thanks be.
And, to top it all, seeing that his right hand and arm might possibly
be crippled for life, or at least an indefinite period (the doctors did not
know), and in grateful appreciation of the fact that he had refused to
deal with various wolfish lawyers who had now descended on him
and urged him to sue for a large sum, he was offered a substantial
pension by the company, or its equivalent, work with the company,
no less, at good pay for the rest of his life, and a cash bonus into the
bargain, a thing which seemed to solve his very uncertain future for
him and put him at his ease. Once more the hand of the saint, you
will certainly admit.
But, lastly, there was the peculiar spiritual consolation that comes
with the feeling that you have done your duty and that a great saint is
on your side. For if all these things did not prove that the good St.
Columba had kept faith with him, what could? To be sure the river
had attempted to do its worst, and had caused him considerable fear
and pain, and perhaps St. Columba did not have as much control
over the river as he should or as he might like to have, or—and this
was far more likely—it was entirely possible that he (McGlathery)
had not at all times deserved the good saint’s support. But none the
less, in the final extremity, had he not acted? And if not, how would
you explain the fact that the tug Mary Baker was just at hand as he
arose out of the water two thousand feet from shore? And why was
it, if the saint had not been trying to help him, that the hospital doctor
had seen to it that he was hustled off to a lock just in time—had
seen, indeed, just such a case as this before, and known how to
handle it? Incontrovertible facts all, aren’t they?—or if not, why not?
 At any rate McGlathery thought so, and on Sundays and holidays,
whether there was or was not anything of importance being
celebrated in his church, he might have been seen there kneeling
before his favorite saint and occasionally eyeing him with both
reverence and admiration. For, “Glory be,” as he frequently
exclaimed in narrating the wonderful event afterward, “I wasn’t stuck
between the shield and the tunnel, as I might ’a’ been, and killed
entirely, and sure, I’ve aaften thought ’tis a miracle that not enough
water come in, just then, to drown ’em aal. It lifted up just enough to
let me go out like a cork, and up I went, and then, God be praised, it
shut down again. But, glory be, here I am, and I’m no worse fer it,
though it do be that me hand wrenches me now and then.”
And as for the good St. Columba—
Well, what about the good St. Columba?
 V
CONVENTION

T HIS story was told to me once by a very able newspaper

cartoonist, and since it makes rather clear the powerfully
repressive and often transforming force of convention, I set it down
as something in the nature of an American social document. As he
told it, it went something like this:
At one time I was a staff artist on the principal paper of one of the
mid-Western cities, a city on a river. It was, and remains to this hour,
a typical American city. No change. It had a population then of
between four and five hundred thousand. It had its clubs and
churches and its conventional goings-on. It was an excellent and
prosperous manufacturing city; nothing more.
On the staff with me at this time was a reporter whom I had known
a little, but never intimately. I don’t know whether I ought to bother to
describe him or not—physically, I mean. His physique is unimportant
to this story. But I think it would be interesting and even important to
take him apart mentally and look at him, if one could—sort out the
various components of his intellectual machinery, and so find out
exactly how his intellectual processes proceeded. However, I can’t
do that; I have not the skill. Barring certain very superficial
characteristics which I will mention, he was then and remains now a
psychological mystery to me. He was what I would describe as
superficially clever, a good writer of a good, practical, matter-of-fact
story. He appeared to be well liked by those who were above him
officially, and he could write Sunday feature stories of a sort, no one
of which, as I saw it, ever contained a moving touch of color or a
breath of real poetry. Some humor he had. He was efficient. He had
a nose for news. He dressed quite well and he was not ill-looking—
tall, thin, wiry, almost leathery. He had a quick, facile smile, a genial
wordflow for all who knew him. He was the kind of man who was on
practical and friendly terms with many men connected with the
commercial organizations and clubs about town, and from whom he
extracted news bits from time to time. By the directing chiefs of the
paper he was considered useful.
Well, this man and I were occasionally sent out on the same
assignment, he to write the story, I to make sketches—usually some
Sunday feature story. Occasionally we would talk about whatever
was before us—newspaper work, politics, the particular story in hand
—but never enthusiastically or warmly about anything. He lacked
what I thought was the artistic and poetic point of view. And yet, as I
say, we were friendly enough. I took him about as any
newspaperman takes another newspaperman of the same staff who
is in good standing.
Along in the spring or summer of the second year that I was on the
paper the Sunday editor, to whom I was beholden in part for my
salary, called me into his room and said that he had decided that
Wallace Steele and myself were to do a feature story about the
“love-boats” which plied Saturday and Sunday afternoons and every
evening up and down the river for a distance of thirty-five miles or
more. This distance, weather permitting, gave an opportunity to six
or seven hundred couples on hot nights to escape the dry, sweltering
heat of the city—and it was hot there in the summer—and to enjoy
the breezes and dance, sometimes by the light of Chinese lanterns,
sometimes by the light of the full moon. It was delightful. Many, many
thousands took advantage of the opportunity in season.
It was delicious to me, then in the prime of youth and ambition, to
sit on the hurricane or “spoon” deck, as our Sunday editor called it,
and study not only the hundreds of boys and girls, but also the older
men and women, who came principally to make love, though
secondarily to enjoy the river and the air, to brood over the
picturesque groupings of the trees, bushes, distant cabins and bluffs
which rose steeply from the river, to watch the great cloud of smoke
that trailed back over us, to see the two halves of the immense steel
walking beam chuff-chuffing up and down, and to listen to the drive
of the water-wheel behind. This was in the days before the
automobile, and any such pleasant means of getting away from the
city was valued much more than it is now.
But to return to this Sunday editor and his orders. I was to make
sketches of spooning couples, or at least of two or three small
distinctive groups with a touch of romance in them. Steele was to tell
how the love-making went on. This, being an innocent method of
amusement, relief from the humdrum of such a world as this was
looked upon with suspicion if not actual disfavor by the wiseacres of
the paper, as well as by the conservatives of the city. True
conservatives would not so indulge themselves. The real object of
the Sunday editor was to get something into his paper that would
have a little kick to it. We were, without exaggerating the matter in
any way, to shock the conservatives by a little picture of life and love,
which, however innocent, was none the less taboo in that city. The
story was to suggest, as I understand it, loose living, low ideals and
the like. These outings did not have the lockstep of business or
religion in them.

II

Well, to proceed. No sooner had the order been given than Steele
came to me to talk it over. He liked the idea very much. It was a good
Sunday subject. Besides, the opportunity for an outing appealed to
him. We were to go on the boat that left the wharf at the foot of
Beach street at eight o’clock that evening. He had been told to write
anything from fifteen hundred to two thousand words. If I made three
good sketches, that would make almost a three-fourths page special.
He would make his story as lively and colorful as he could. He was
not a little flattered, I am sure, by having been called to interpret
such a gay, risqué scene.
It was about one-thirty when we had been called in. About four
o’clock he came to me again. We had, as I had assumed, tentatively
agreed to meet at the wharf entrance and do the thing together. By
now, however, he had another plan. Perhaps I should say here that
up to that moment I only vaguely knew that he had a wife and child
and that he lived with them somewhere in the southwestern section
of the city, whether in his own home or a rooming-house, I did not
know. Come to think of it, just before this I believe I had heard him
remark to others that his wife was out of the city. At any rate, he now
said that since his wife was out of the city and as the woman of
whom they rented their rooms was a lonely and a poor person who
seldom got out anywhere, he had decided to bring her along for the
outing. I needn’t wait for him. He would see me on the boat, or we
could discuss the story later.
I agreed to this and was prepared to think nothing of it except for
one thing. His manner of telling me had something about it, or there
was some mood or thought in connection with it in his own mind,
which reached me telepathetically, and caused me to think that he
was taking advantage of his wife’s absence to go out somewhere
with some one else. And yet, at that, I could not see why I thought
about it. The thing had no real interest for me. And I had not the least
proof and wanted none. As I say, I was not actually interested. I did
not know his wife at all. I did not care for him or her. I did not care
whether he flirted with some one else or not. Still, this silly, critical
thought passed through my mind, put into it by him, I am sure,
because he was thinking—at least, might have been thinking—that I
might regard it as strange that he should appear anywhere with
another woman than his wife. Apart from this, and before this, seeing
him buzzing about here and there, and once talking to a girl on a
street corner near the Mail office, I had only the vague notion that,
married or not, he was a young man who was not averse to slipping
away for an hour or two with some girl whom he knew or casually
met, provided no one else knew anything about it, especially his
wife. But that was neither here nor there. I never gave the man much
thought at any time.
At any rate, seven o’clock coming, I had my dinner at a little
restaurant near the office and went to the boat. It was a hot night, but
clear and certain to bring a lovely full moon, and I was glad to be
going. At the same time, I was not a little lonely and out of sorts with
myself because I had no girl and was wishing that I had—wishing
that some lovely girl was hanging on my arm and that now we two
could go down to the boat together and sit on the spoon deck and
look at the moon, or that we could dance on the cabin deck below,
where were all the lights and musicians. My hope, if not my
convinced expectation, was that somewhere on this boat I, too,
should find some one who would be interested in me—I, too, should
be able to sit about with the others and laugh and make love. But I
didn’t. The thought was futile. I was not a ladies’ man, and few if any
girls ever looked at me. Besides, women and girls usually came
accompanied on a trip like this. I went alone, and I returned alone.
So much for me.
Brooding in this fashion, I went aboard along with the earliest of
the arrivals, and, going to the cabin deck, sat down and watched the
others approach. It was one of my opportunities to single out
interesting groups for my pen. And there were many. They came, so
blithe, so very merry, all of them, in pairs or groups of four or six or
eight or ten, boys and girls of the tenements and the slums—a few
older couples among them,—but all smiling and chatting, the last
ones hurrying excitedly to make the boat, and each boy with his girl,
as I was keen to note, and each girl with her beau. I singled out this
group and that, this type and that, making a few idle notes on my
pad, just suggestions of faces, hats, gestures, swings or rolls of the
body and the like. There was a strong light over the gangway, and I
could sketch there. It was interesting and colorful, but, being very
much alone, I was not very happy about it.
In the midst of these, along with the latter half of the crowd, came
Steele and his lonely landlady, to whom, as he said, this proffer on
his part was a kindness. Because of what he had said I was
expecting a woman who would be somewhat of a frump—at least
thirty-five or forty years old and not very attractive. But to my
surprise, as they came up the long gangplank which led from the
levee and was lighted by flaring gasoline torches, I saw a young
woman who could not have been more than twenty-seven or -eight
at most—and pretty, very. She had on a wide, floppy, lacy hat of
black or dark blue, but for contrast a pale, cream-colored, flouncy
dress. And she was graceful and plump and agreeable in every way.
Some landlady, indeed, I thought, looking enviously down and
wishing that it was myself and not he to whose arm she was clinging!
 The bounder! I thought. To think that he should be able to interest
so charming a girl, and in the absence of his wife! And I could get
none! He had gone home and changed to a better suit, straw hat,
cane and all, whereas I—I—dub!—had come as I was. No wonder
no really interesting girl would look at me. Fool! But I remained in
position studying the entering throng until the last couple was on and
I listened to the cries of “Heave off, there!” “Loosen those stay lines,
will you?” “Careful, there!” “Hurry with that gangplank!” Soon we
were in midstream. The jouncy, tinny music had begun long before,
and the couples, scores and scores of them, were already dancing
on the cabin deck, while I was left to hang about the bar or saunter
through the crowd, looking for types when I didn’t want to be
anywhere but close beside some girl on the spoon deck, who would
hang on my arm, laugh into my eyes, and jest and dance with me.

III

Because of what he had said, I did not expect Steele to come near
me, and he didn’t. In sauntering about the two decks looking for
arresting scenes I did not see him. Because I wanted at least one or
two spoon deck scenes, I finally fixed on a couple that was half-
hidden in the shadow back of the pilot-house. They had crumpled
themselves up forward of an air-vent and not far from the two
smoke-stacks and under the walking-beam, which rose and fell
above them. The full moon was just above the eastern horizon,
offering a circular background for them, and I thought they made a
romantic picture outlined against it. I could not see their faces—just
their outlines. Her head was upon his shoulder. His face was turned,
and so concealed, and inclined toward hers. Her hat had been taken
off and was held over her knee by one hand. I stepped back a little
toward a companion-way, where was a light, in order to outline my
impression. When I returned, they were sitting up. It was Steele and
his rooming-house proprietress! It struck me as odd that of all the
couple and group scenes that I had noted, the most romantic should
have been that provided by Steele and this woman. His wife would
be interested in his solicitude for her loneliness and her lack of
opportunities to get out into the open air, I was sure. Yet, I was not
envious then—just curious and a little amused.
Well, that was the end of that. The sketches were made, and the
story published. Because he and this girl had provided my best
scene I disguised it a little, making it not seem exactly back of the
pilot-house, since otherwise he might recognize it. He was, for once,
fascinated by the color and romance of the occasion, and did a
better story than I thought he could. It dwelt on the beauty of the
river, the freedom from heat, the loveliness of the moon, the dancing.
I thought it was very good, quite exceptional for him, and I thought I
knew the reason why.
And then one day, about a month or six weeks later, being in the
city room, I encountered the wife of Steele and their little son, a child
of about five years. She had stopped in about three or four in the
afternoon, being downtown shopping, I presume. After seeing him
with the young woman on the steamer, I was, I confess, not a little
shocked. This woman was so pinched, so homely, so faded—
veritably a rail of a woman, everything and anything that a woman,
whether wife, daughter, mother or sweetheart, as I saw it then,
should not be. As a matter of fact, I was too wrought up about love
and youth and marriage and happiness at that time to rightly judge of
the married. At any rate, after having seen that other woman on that
deck with Steele, I was offended by this one.
She seemed to me, after the other, too narrow, too methodical, too
commonplace, too humdrum. She was a woman whose
pulchritudinous favors, whatever they may have been, must have
been lost at the altar. In heaven’s name, I thought to myself, how
could a man like this come to marry such a woman? He isn’t so very
good-looking himself, perhaps, but still.... No wonder he wanted to
take his rooming-house landlady for an outing! I would, too. I could
understand it now. In fact, as little as I cared for Steele, I felt sorry
that a man of his years and of his still restless proclivities should be
burdened with such a wife. And not only that, but there was their
child, looking not unlike him but more like her, one of those hostages
to fortune by reason of which it is never easy to free oneself from the
error of a mistaken marriage. His plight, as I saw it, was indeed
unfortunate. And it was still summer and there was this other
woman!
Well, I was introduced by him as the man who worked on some of
his stories with him. I noticed that the woman had a thin, almost a
falsetto voice. She eyed me, as I thought, unintelligently, yet genially
enough. I was invited to come out to their place some Sunday and
take dinner. Because of his rooming-house story I was beginning to
wonder whether he had been lying to me, when she went on to
explain that they had been boarding up to a few weeks ago, but had
now taken a cottage for themselves and could have their friends. I
promised. Yes, yes. But I never went—not to dinner, anyhow.

IV

Then two more months passed. By now it was late fall, with winter
near. The current news, as I saw it, was decidedly humdrum. There
was no local news to speak of. I scarcely glanced at the papers from
day to day, no more than to see whether some particular illustration I
had done was in and satisfactory or not. But then, of a sudden, came
something which was genuine news. Steele’s wife was laid low by a
box of poisoned candy sent her through the mails, some of which
she had eaten!
Just how the news of this first reached the papers I have almost
forgotten now, but my recollection is that there was another
newspaperman and his wife—a small editor or reporter on another
paper—who lived in the same vicinity, and that it was to this
newspaperman’s wife that Mrs. Steele, after having called her in,
confided that she believed she had been poisoned, and by a woman
whose name she now gave as Mrs. Marie Davis, and with whom, as
she then announced, her husband had long been intimate—the lady
of the Steamer Ira Ramsdell. She had recognized the handwriting on
the package from some letters written to her husband, but only after
she had eaten of the candy and felt the pains—not before. Her
condition was serious. She was, it appeared, about to die. In this
predicament she had added, so it was said, that she had long been
neglected by her husband for this other woman, but that she had
suffered in silence rather than bring disgrace upon him, herself and
their child. Now this cruel blow!
Forthwith a thrill of horror and sympathy passed over the city. It
seemed too sad. At the same time a cry went up to find the other
woman—arrest her, of course—see if she had really done it. There
followed the official detention, if not legal arrest, of Mrs. Davis on
suspicion of being the poisoner. Although the charge was not yet
proved, she was at once thrown into jail, and there held to await the
death or recovery of Mrs. Steele, and the proof or disproof of the
charge that the candy had been sent by her. And cameras in hand,
reporters and artists were packed off to the county jail to hear the
accused’s side of the story.
As I at once suspected on hearing the news, she proved to be
none other than the lady of the Ira Ramsdell, and as charming as I
had at first assumed her to be. I, being one of those sent to sketch
her, was among the first to hear her story. She denied, and very
vehemently, that she had sent any poisoned candy to any one. She
had never dreamed of any such thing. But she did not deny, which at
the time appeared to me to be incriminating, that she had been and
was then in love with Steele. In fact, and this point interested me as
much then as afterwards, she declared that this was an exceptional
passion—her love for him, his love for her—and no mere passing
and vulgar intimacy. A high and beautiful thing—a sacred love, the
one really true and beautiful thing that had ever come to her—or him
—in all their lives. And he would say so, too. For before meeting her,
Wallace Steele had been very unhappy—oh, very. And her own
marriage had been a failure.
Wallace, as she now familiarly called him, had confessed to her
that this new, if secret, love meant everything to him. His wife did not
interest him. He had married her at a time when he did not know
what he was doing, and before he had come to be what he was. But
this new love had resolved all their woes into loveliness—complete
happiness. They had resolved to cling only to each other for life.
There was no sin in what they had done because they loved. Of
course, Wallace had sought to induce Mrs. Steele to divorce him, but
she would not; otherwise they would have been married before this.
But as Mrs. Steele would not give him up, both had been compelled
to make the best of it. But to poison her—that was wild! A love so
beautiful and true as theirs did not need a marriage ceremony to
sanctify it. So she raved. My own impression at the time was that
she was a romantic and sentimental woman who was really very
greatly in love.
Now as to Steele. Having listened to this blazoning of her passion
by herself, the interviewers naturally hurried to Steele to see what he
would have to say. In contrast to her and her grand declaration, they
found a man, as every one agreed, who was shaken to the very
marrow of his bones by these untoward events. He was, it appeared,
a fit inhabitant of the environment that nourished him. He was in
love, perhaps, with this woman, but still, as any one could see, he
was not so much in love that, if this present matter were going to
cost him his place in this commonplace, conventional world, he
would not be able to surrender to it. He was horrified by the
revelation of his own treachery. Up to this hour, no doubt, he had
been slipping about, hoping not to be caught, and most certainly not
wishing to be cast out for sin. Regardless of the woman, he did not
wish to be cast out now. On the contrary, as it soon appeared, he
had been doing his best in the past to pacify his wife and hold her to
silence while he slaked his thirst for romance in this other way. He
did not want his wife, but he did not want trouble, either. And now
that his sin was out he shivered.
In short, as he confided to one of the men who went to interview
him, and who agreed to respect his confidence to that extent, he was
not nearly so much in love with Mrs. Davis as she thought he was—
poor thing! True he had been infatuated for a while, but only a little
while. She was pretty, of course, and naturally she thought she loved
him—but he never expected anything like this to happen. Great
cripes! They had met at a river bathing-beach the year before. He
had been smitten—well, you know. He had never got along well with
his wife, but there was the little boy to consider. He had not intended
any harm to any one; far from it. And he certainly couldn’t turn on his
wife now. The public wouldn’t stand for it. It would make trouble for
him. But he could scarcely be expected to turn on Mrs. Davis, either,
could he, now that she was in jail, and suspected of sending
poisoned candy to his wife? The public wouldn’t stand for that, either.
It was terrible! Pathetic! He certainly would not have thought that
Marie would go to the length of sending his wife poison, and he
didn’t really believe that she had. Still—and there may have been
some actual doubt of her in that “still,” or so the reporting
newspapermen thought. At any rate, as he saw it now, he would
have to stick to his wife until she was out of danger. Public opinion
compelled it. The general impression of the newspapermen was that
he was a coward. As one of them said of his courage, “Gee, it’s
oozing out of his hair!”
Nevertheless, he did go to see Mrs. Davis several times. But apart
from a reported sobbing demonstration of affection on her part, I
never learned what passed between them. He would not talk and
she had been cautioned not to. Also, there were various interviews
with his wife, who had not died, and now that the storm was on,
admitted that she had intercepted letters between her husband and
Mrs. Davis from time to time. The handwriting on the candy wrapper
the day she received it so resembled the handwriting of Mrs. Davis
that after she had eaten of it and the symptoms of poisoning had set
in—not before—she had begun to suspect that the candy must have
emanated from Mrs. Davis.

In the meantime Mrs. Davis, despite the wife’s sad story, was the
major attraction in the newspapers. She was young, she was
beautiful, she had made, or at least attempted to make, a blood
sacrifice on the altar of love. What more could a daily newspaper
want? She was a heroine, even in this very moral, conservative,
conventional and religious city. The rank and file were agog—even
sympathetic. (How would the moralists explain that, would you say?)
In consequence of their interest, she was descended upon by a
corps of those women newspaper writers who, even in that day,
were known as sob-sisters, and whose business it was—and this in
advance of any proof of crime or indictment even—to psychologize
and psychiatrize the suspect—to dig out if they could not only every
vestige of her drama, but all her hidden and secret motives.
As I read the newspapers at the time, they revealed that she was
and she was not a neurotic, a psychotic, who showed traces of being
a shrewd, evasive and designing woman, and who did not. Also she
was a soft, unsophisticated, passionate and deeply illusioned girl,
and she was not. She was guilty, of course—maybe not—but very
likely she was, and she must tell how, why, in what mood, etc. Also,
it appeared that she had sent the poison deliberately, coldly,
murderously. Her eyes and hands, also the shape of her nose and
ears, showed it. Again, these very things proved she could not have
done it. Had she been driven to it by stress of passionate emotion
and yearning which had been too much for her to bear? Was she
responsible for that—a great, destroying love? Of course she was!
Who is not responsible for his deeds? A great, overwhelming,
destroying love passion, indeed! Rot! She could help it. She could
not help it. Could she help it? So it went.
Parallel with all this, of course, we were treated to various
examinations of the Steele family. What sort of people were they,
anyhow? It was said of Steele now that he was an average, fairly
capable newspaperman of no very startling ability, but of no
particular vices—one who had for some years been a serious and
faithful employé of this paper. Mrs. Steele, on the other hand, was a
good woman, but by no means prepossessing. She was without
romance, imagination, charm. One could see by looking at her and
then looking at so winsome and enticing a woman as Mrs. Davis why
Steele had strayed. It was the old eternal triangle—the woman who
was not interesting, the woman who was interesting, and the man
interested by the more interesting woman. There was no solving it,
but it was all very sad. One could not help sympathizing with Mrs.
Steele, the wronged woman; and again one could not help
sympathizing with Mrs. Davis, the beautiful, passionate, desirous,
helpless beauty—helpless because she was desirous.
In the meantime, the District Attorney’s office having taken the
case in hand, there were various developments in that quarter. It was
necessary to find out, of course, where the candy had been
purchased, how it had been drugged, with what it had been drugged,
where the drug had been purchased. Chemists, detectives and
handwriting experts were all set to work. It was no trouble to
determine that the drug was arsenic, yet where this arsenic was
purchased was not so easy to discover. It was some time before it
was found where it had been procured. Dissimilarly, it was
comparatively easy to prove where the candy had come from. It had
been sent in the original box of a well-known candy firm. Yet just who
had purchased it was not quite so easy to establish. The candy
company could not remember, and Mrs. Davis, although admitting
that the handwriting did resemble hers, denied ever having
addressed the box or purchased any candy from the firm in question.
She was quite willing to go there and be identified, but no clerk in the
candy-store was able to identify her as one woman who had
purchased candy. There were one or two clerks who felt sure that
there had been a woman there at some time or other who had
looked like her, but they were not positive. However, there was one
girl who had worked in the store during the week in which the candy
had been purchased, and who was not there any longer. This was a
new girl who had been tried out for that week only and had since
disappeared. Her name was known, of course, and the newspapers
as well as the District Attorney’s office at once began looking for her.
There were some whispers to the effect that not only Mrs. Davis
but Steele himself might have been concerned in the plot, or Steele
alone, since apparently he had been anxious to get rid of his wife.
Why not? He might have imitated the handwriting of Mrs. Davis or
created an accidental likeness to it. Also, there were dissenting
souls, even in the office of the paper on which I worked, who thought
that maybe Mrs. Steele had sent the candy to herself in order to
injure the other woman. Why not? It was possible. Women were like
that. There had been similar cases, had there not? Argument!
Contention! “She might have wanted to die and be revenged on the
other woman at the same time, might she not?” observed the
railroad editor. “Oh, hell! What bunk!” called another. “No woman
would kill herself to make a place for a rival. That’s crazy.” “Well,”
said a third, “she might have miscalculated the power of her own
dope. Who knows? She may not have intended to take as much as
she did.” “Oh, Christ,” called a fourth from somewhere, “just listen to
the Sherlock Holmes Association in session over there! Lay off, will
you?”
A week or more went by, and then the missing girl who had
worked in the candy-store was found. She had left the city the
following week and gone to Denver. Being shown the pictures of
Mrs. Davis, Mrs. Steele and some others and asked whether on any
given day she had sold any of them a two-pound box of candy, she
seemed to recall no one of them save possibly Mrs. Steele. But she
could not be sure from the photograph. She would have to see the
woman. In consequence, and without any word to the newspapers
who had been leading the case up to then, this girl was returned to
the city. Here, in the District Attorney’s office, she was confronted by
a number of women gathered for the occasion, among whom was
placed Mrs. Davis. But on looking them all over she failed to identify
any one of them. Then Mrs. Steele, who was by then up and around,
was sent for. She came, along with a representative of the office. On
sight, as she entered the door, and although there were other
women in the room at the time, this girl exclaimed: “There she is!
That’s the woman! Yes, that’s the very woman!” She was positive.

VI

As is customary in such cases, and despite the sympathy that had

been extended to her, Mrs. Steele was turned over to criminologists,
who soon extracted the truth from her. She broke down and wept
hysterically.
It was she who had purchased the candy and poisoned it. Her life
was going to pieces. She had wanted to die, so she said now. She
had addressed the wrapper about the candy, as some of the
wiseacres of our paper had contended, only she had first made a
tracing on the paper from Mrs. Davis’ handwriting, on an envelope
addressed to her husband, and had then copied that. She had put
not arsenic, but rat poison, bought some time before, into the candy,
and in order to indict Mrs. Davis, she had put a little in each piece,
about as much as would kill a rat, so that it would seem as though
the entire box had been poisoned by her. She had got the idea from
a case she had read about years before in a newspaper. She hated
Mrs. Davis for stealing her husband. She had followed them.
When she had eaten one of the pieces of candy she had thought,
as she now insisted, that she was taking enough to make an end of it
all. But before taking it she had made sure that Mrs. Dalrymple, the
wife of the newspaperman whom she first called to her aid, was at
home in order that she might call or send her little boy. Her purpose
in doing this was to instil in the mind of Mrs. Dalrymple the belief that
it was Mrs. Davis who had sent the poison. When she was gone,
Mrs. Davis would be punished, her husband would not be able to
have her, and she herself would be out of her misery.
Result: the prompt discharge of Mrs. Davis, but no charge against
Mrs. Steele. According to the District Attorney and the newspapers
who most truly reflected local sentiment, she had suffered enough.
And, as the state of public feeling then was, the District Attorney
would not have dared to punish her. Her broken confession so
reacted on the public mind that now, and for all time, it was for Mrs.
Steele, just as a little while before it was rather for Mrs. Davis. For,
you see, it was now proved that it was Mrs. Steele and not Mrs.
Davis who had been wrought up to that point emotionally where she
had been ready and willing—had actually tried—to make a blood
sacrifice of herself and another woman on the altar of love. In either
case it was the blood sacrifice—the bare possibility of it, if you
choose—that lay at the bottom of the public’s mood, and caused it to
turn sympathetically to that one who had been most willing to murder
in the cause of love.
But don’t think this story is quite ended. Far from it. There is
something else here, and a very interesting something to which I
wish to call your attention. I have said that the newspapers turned
favorably to Mrs. Steele. They did. So did the sob-sisters, those true
barometers of public moods. Eulogies were now heaped upon Mrs.
Steele, her devotion, her voiceless, unbearable woe, the tragedy of
her mood, her intended sacrifice of herself. She was now the darling
of these journalistic pseudo-analysts.
 As for Mrs. Davis—not a word of sympathy, let alone praise or
understanding for her thereafter. Almost unmentioned, if you will
believe it, she was, and at once allowed to slip back into the limbo of
the unheralded, the subsequently-to-be-unknown. From then on it
was almost as though she had never been. For a few weeks, I
believe, she retired to the home in which she had lived; then she
disappeared entirely.
But now as to Steele. Here was the third peculiar phase of the
case. Subsequent to the exculpation of Mrs. Davis and her noiseless
retirement from the scene, what would you say his attitude would
have been, or should have been? Where would he go? What do?
What attitude would he assume? One of renewed devotion to his
wife? One of renewed devotion to Mrs. Davis? One of disillusion or
indifference in regard to all things? It puzzled me, and I was a rank
outsider with no least concern, except of course our general concern
in all such things, so vital to all of us in our sex and social lives. But
not only was it a puzzle to me; it was also a puzzle to others,
especially those who were identified with the newspaper business in
the city, the editors and the city editors and managing editors who
had been following the wavering course of things with uncertain
thoughts and I may say uncertain policy. They had been, as you may
guess, as prepared to hang Steele as not, assuming that he had
been identified with Mrs. Davis in a plot to do away with his wife. On
the other hand, now that that shadow was removed and it was seen
to be a more or less simple case of varietism on his part, resulting in
marital unhappiness for his wife and a desire on her part to die, they
were prepared to look upon him and this result with a more kindly
eye. After all, she was not dead. Mrs. Davis had been punished. And
say what you will, looking at Mrs. Steele as she was, and at Mrs.
Davis as she was—well—with a certain amount of material if not
spiritual provocation—what would you?
Indeed, the gabble about the newspaper offices was all to the
above effect. What, if anything, finally asked some of the city editors
and managing editors, was to be done about Steele? Now that
everything had blown over, what of him? Go on hounding him
forever? Nonsense! It was scarcely fair, and, anyhow, no longer
profitable or worth while. Now that the storm was passing, might not
something be done for him? After all, he had been a fairly
respectable newspaperman and in good standing. Why not take him
back? And if not that, how was he to be viewed in future by his
friends? Was he to be let alone, dropped, forgotten, or what? Was he
going to stay here in G——, and fight it out, or leave? And if he was
going to leave or stay, with whom was he going to leave or stay?
Semikindly, semiselfish curiosity, as you see.

VII

The thing to do, it was finally decided among several of those on

our paper and several on other papers who had known him more or
less intimately, was to go to Steele himself, and ask him, not for
publicity but just between ourselves, what was to be done, what he
proposed to do, whether there was anything now that the local
newspapers could say or do which would help him in any way? Did
he want to be restored to a staff position? Was he going to stick to
his wife? What, if anything, and with no malicious intent, should they
say about Mrs. Davis? In a more or less secret and brotherly or
professional spirit they were going to put it up to him and then leave
it there, doing whatever they could in accordance with what he might
wish.
Accordingly, two of the local newsmen whom he quite honestly
respected visited him and placed the above several propositions
before him. They found him, as I was told afterwards, seated upon
the front porch of the very small and commonplace house in which
after the dismissal of the charge against Mrs. Davis, he and his wife
had been dwelling, reading a paper. Seated with him was Mrs.
Steele, thinner and more querulous and anemic and unattractive
than before. And upon the lot outside was their little son. Upon their
arrival, they hailed Steele for a private word, and Mrs. Steele arose
and went into the house. She looked, said one of these men, as
though she expected more trouble. Steele, on his part, was all smiles
and genial tenderings of hospitality. He was hoping for the best, of
course, and he was anxious to do away with any new source of
trouble. He even rubbed his hands, and licked his lips. “Come right
in, boys. Come on up on the porch. Wait a minute and I’ll bring out a
couple of chairs.” He hastened away but quickly returned,
determined, as they thought, to make as good an impression as
possible.
After he had heard what they had come for—most tactfully and
artfully put, of course—he was all smiles, eager, apparently, to be
well thought of once more. To their inquiry as to whether he
proposed to remain or not, he replied: “Yes, for the present.” He had
not much choice. He had not saved enough money in recent days to
permit him to do much of anything else, and his wife’s illness and
other things had used up about all he had. “And now, just between
ourselves, Steele,” asked one of the two men who knew him better
than the other, “what about Mrs. Davis and your wife? Just where do
you stand in regard to them? Are you going to stick to your wife or
are you going with the other woman eventually? No trouble for you,
you understand—no more publicity. But the fellows on the papers
are in a little bit of a quandary in regard to this. They don’t intend to
publish anything more—nothing disparaging. They only want to get
your slant on the thing so that if anything more does come up in
connection with this they can fix it so that it won’t be offensive to you,
you see.”
“Yes, I see,” replied Steele cheerfully and without much reflection.
“But so far as that Davis woman is concerned, though, you can
forget her. I’m through with her. She was never much to me, anyhow,
just a common——.” Here he used the good old English word for
prostitute. As for his wife, he was going to stick by her, of course.
She was a good woman. She loved him. There was his little boy. He
was through with all that varietistic stuff. There was nothing to it. A
man couldn’t get away with it—and so on.
The two men, according to their account of it afterward, winced not
a little, for, as they said, they had thought from all that had gone
before that there had surely been much more than common
prostitution between Steele and the woman. How could all this have
been in the face of Mrs. Steele’s great jealousy, Mrs. Davis’
passionate declaration about pure, spiritual and undying love?
Imagine it! After a few more words the men left, convinced that