Grammatical Evolution: Evolutionary Automatic Programming in an Arbitrary Language

by Michael O'Neill, Conor Ryan

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.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2003

About the author

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Adil Raja · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book almost eleven years ago. This is a remarkable book and you must definitely read it if you are into evolutionary algorithms, machine learning, genetic programming, computer science and/or optimization. The authors introduce a novel way of automatically generating computer programs for solving user-specified problems. The authors begin by talking about the genetic analog from which they conceived the idea. Then they speak about how a genetic algorithm could be coupled with a grammar specified in a Backus-Naur Form to generate computer programs. In short, this is a small book that you can almost finish in a single sitting. And you will stand up well equipped with the technical and conceptual underpinnings of the algorithm.

[Xianshun Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book I used to develop my own grammatical evolution library