Grammatical Evolution, Vol. 4

Grammatical Evolution: Evolutionary Automatic Programming in an Arbitrary Language provides the first comprehensive introduction to Grammatical Evolution, a novel approach to Genetic Programming that adopts principles from molecular biology in a simple and useful manner, coupled with the use of grammars to specify legal structures in a search. Grammatical Evolution's rich modularity gives a unique flexibility, making it possible to use alternative search strategies - whether evolutionary, deterministic or some other approach - and to even radically change its behavior by merely changing the grammar supplied. This approach to Genetic Programming represents a powerful new weapon in the Machine Learning toolkit that can be applied to a diverse set of problem domains.

An introduction to grammatical evolution, an approach to genetic programming that adopts principles from molecular biology in conjunction with the use of grammars to specify legal structures in a search. The volume begins with an overview of background material in genetic programming and molecular biology and an outline of current grammatical and genotype-phenotype-based approaches. It describes grammatical evolution and its application to a number of example problems and also offers detailed an analysis of the approach, focusing on such themes as the degenerate genetic code, wrapping, and crossover. Timely topics in grammatical evolution are presented in the final part, with additional coverage of directions for future research. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR