Do Additional Target Points Speed Up Evolutionary Algorithms?

Most runtime analyses of randomised search heuristics focus on the expected number of function evaluations to find a unique global optimum. We ask a fundamental question: if additional search points are declared optimal, or declared as desirable target points, do these additional optima speed up evolutionary algorithms? More formally, we analyse the expected hitting time of a target set OPT{$\cup$}S where S is a set of non-optimal search points and OPT is the set of optima and compare it to the expected hitting time of OPT. We show that the answer to our question depends on the number and placement of search points in S. For all black-box algorithms and all fitness functions with polynomial expected optimisation times we show that, if additional optima are placed randomly, even an exponential number of optima has a negligible effect on the expected optimisation time. Considering Hamming balls around all global optima gives an easier target for some algorithms and functions and can shift the phase transition with respect to offspring population sizes in the (1,{$\lambda$}) EA on OneMax. However, for the one-dimensional Ising model the time to reach Hamming balls of radius (1/2-{$ϵ$})n around optima does not reduce the asymptotic expected optimisation time in the worst case. Finally, on functions where search trajectories typically join in a single search point, turning one search point into an optimum drastically reduces the expected optimisation time.