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European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation

EvoApplications 2017: Applications of Evolutionary Computation pp 66–81Cite as

Polytypic Genetic Programming

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10200))

Abstract

Program synthesis via heuristic search often requires a great deal of ‘boilerplate’ code to adapt program APIs to the search mechanism. In addition, the majority of existing approaches are not type-safe: i.e. they can fail at runtime because the search mechanisms lack the strict type information often available to the compiler. In this article, we describe Polytope, a Scala framework that uses polytypic programming, a relatively recent advance in program abstraction. Polytope requires a minimum of boilerplate code and supports a form of strong-typing in which type rules are automatically enforced by the compiler, even for search operations such as mutation which are applied at runtime. By operating directly on language-native expressions, it provides an embeddable optimization procedure for existing code. We give a tutorial example of the specific polytypic approach we adopt and compare both runtime efficiency and required lines of code against the well-known EpochX GP framework, showing comparable performance in the former and the complete elimination of boilerplate for the latter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Not to be confused with the weaker notion of abstract data types.

  2. 2.

    We focus on tree-based GP in this paper.

  3. 3.

    The term ‘coproduct’ represents a generalized notion of ‘sum’ inherited from Category Theory.

  4. 4.

    Type constructors in Scala can be infix and composed of non-alphabetic characters.

  5. 5.

    http://www.epochx.org/javadoc/1.4/.

  6. 6.

    as determined by the nonparametric Wilcoxon Signed Rank test.

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Acknowledgements

J. Swan would like to thank Miles Sabin and the contributors to the Scala ‘shapeless’ library. His work on this paper is funded by EPSRC grant EP/J017515/1 (DAASE). K. Krawiec acknowledges support from National Science Centre, Poland, grant 2014/15/B/ST6/05205.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science, University of York, Deramore Lane, York, YO10 5GH, UK

    Jerry Swan

  2. Institute of Computing Science, Poznan University of Technology, 60-965, Poznań, Poland

    Krzysztof Krawiec

  3. Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, G1 1XH, Scotland

    Neil Ghani

Authors
  1. Jerry Swan
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  2. Krzysztof Krawiec
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  3. Neil Ghani
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Correspondence to Jerry Swan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy

    Giovanni Squillero

  2. Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

    Kevin Sim

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Swan, J., Krawiec, K., Ghani, N. (2017). Polytypic Genetic Programming. In: Squillero, G., Sim, K. (eds) Applications of Evolutionary Computation. EvoApplications 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10200. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55792-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55792-2_5

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