W.B. Langdon, University College, London, UK

R. Poli, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

Genetic programming (GP), one of the most advanced forms of evolutionary computation, has been highly successful as a technique for getting computers to automatically solve problems without having to tell them explicitly how. Since its inceptions more than ten years ago, GP has been used to solve practical problems in a variety of application fields. Along with this ad-hoc engineering approaches interest increased in how and why GP works.

The book provides a coherent consolidation of recent work on the theoretical foundations of GP. A concise introduction to GP and genetic algorithms (GA) is followed by a discussion of fitness landscapes and other theoretical approaches to natural and artificial evolution. Having surveyed early approaches to GP theory it presents new exact schema analysis, showing that it applies to GP as well as to the simpler GAs. New results on the potentially infinite number of possible programs are followed by two chapters where these new techniques are applied. Finally the nature of convergence in artificial evolution is explored.

This book equally appeals to researchers and scientists active in GP and GAs as well as to advanced students and ambitioned practitioners interested in a thorough and systematic introduction to the field.

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URL: http://www.springer.de

List of Special Symbols

Glossary

Index