Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
17
Evolutionary Computation and
G
enetic Programmi
ng
Wolfgang Banzhaf
Department of Computer Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland,
St. John's, NL A1B 3X5, Canada
Prospectus
This chapter focuses on evolutionary computation,
in particular genetic programming, as examples of
drawing inspiration from biological systems. We set
the choice of evolution as a source for inspiration
in context and discuss the history of evolutionary
computation and its variants before looking more
closely at genetic programming. After a discussion of
methods and the state of the art, we review applica-
tion areas of genetic programming and its strength in
providing human-competitive solutions.
17.
1 BIOINSPIRED COMPUTI
NG
One of the more prominent examples of bioin-
spiration is the application of this philosophy to
the development of new ways to organize com-
putation. Life can be paraphrased by describing
it as “information processing in a body.” Hence
biology, the science of the living, has long been
concerned with these two key aspects of life:
structure and dynamics. The structure of the
body, from a single-celled organism such as a
bacterium to extended, highly complex, multi-
cellular, intelligent beings such as mammals,
1
is
a study object of evolutionary, developmental,
and molecular biology, among other subjects.
Other branches of biology are concerned with
the dynamics of behavior of organisms in rela-
tion to an inanimate environment as well as in
relation to other organisms that often provide
Keywords
Algorithms, Artificial intelligence, Automatic pro-
gramming,
Bioinspired
computing,
Breeding,
Crossover,
Differential
evolution,
Evolutionary
computation, Evolutionary programming, Evolution
strategies, Generation, Genetic algorithms, Genetic
programming, Human-competitive, Machine learn-
ing, Mutation, Natural selection, Population, Repro-
duction, Search space
1
The spatially largest organism is a fungus,
Armillaria solipides,
with an extension of 8.9 km
2
,
whereas the largest
genome of a vertebrate is that of a fish,
Protopterus aetiopicus,
with a size of 130 Giga bases (as compared to the
3.2 Giga bases of
Homo sapiens
)
.
A base is one of four nucleotides in the alphabet of DNA.
