Figure 6. Histograms of Hamming distances from an ancestral genotype obtained through neutral paths.

We chose a sample of 10⁴ three-toyGene genotypes at random and, for each of them, computed a neutral random walk (see text). For each random walk, we then measured the Hamming distance between the final genotype and the original one. The histograms show the distribution of Hamming distances. We repeated this experiment with random walks of length 10² (A), 10³ (B) and 10⁴ (C). The average distance grows with the length of the random walks: from 12.4 (A) to 14.0 (B) to 16.6 (C). Note that the width of the distributions also grows with the length of the random walk.