Bivariate estimation-of-distribution algorithms can find an exponential number of optima

Finding a large set of optima in a multimodal optimization landscape is a challenging task. Classical population-based evolutionary algorithms (EAs) typically converge only to a single solution. While this can be counteracted by applying niching strategies, the number of optima is nonetheless trivially bounded by the population size. Estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs) are an alternative, maintaining a probabilistic model of the solution space instead of an explicit population. Such a model is able to implicitly represent a solution set that is far larger than any realistic population size. To support the study of how optimization algorithms handle large sets of optima, we propose the test function EqalBlocksOneMax (EBOM). It has an easy to optimize fitness landscape, however, with an exponential number of optima. We show that the bivariate EDA mutual-information-maximizing input clustering (MIMIC), without any problem-specific modification, quickly generates a model that behaves very similarly to a theoretically ideal model for that function, which samples each of the exponentially many optima with the same maximal probability.