Evolving Evolutionary Algorithms

This paper proposes a Grammatical Evolution framework to the automatic design of Evolutionary Algorithms. We define a grammar that has the ability to combine components regularly appearing in existing evolutionary algorithms, aiming to achieve novel and fully functional optimization methods. The problem of the Royal Road Functions is used to assess the capacity of the framework to evolve algorithms. Results show that the computational system is able to evolve simple evolutionary algorithms that can effectively solve Royal Road instances. Moreover, some unusual design solutions, competitive with standard approaches, are also proposed by the grammatical evolution framework.