Grammatical evolution

Grammatical evolution (GE) is an evolutionary computation and, more specifically, a genetic programming (GP) technique (or approach) pioneered by Conor Ryan, JJ Collins and Michael O'Neill in 1998^[1] at the BDS Group in the University of Limerick.

As in any other GP approach, the objective is to find an executable program, program fragment, or function, which will achieve a good fitness value for a given objective function. In most published work on GP, a LISP-style tree-structured expression is directly manipulated, whereas GE applies genetic operators to an integer string, subsequently mapped to a program (or similar) through the use of a grammar, which is typically expressed in Backus–Naur form. One of the benefits of GE is that this mapping simplifies the application of search to different programming languages and other structures.