An introduction to evolutionary programming

Abstract

Evolutionary programming is a method for simulating evolution that has been investigated for over 30 years. This paper offers an introduction to evolutionary programming, and indicates its relationship to other methods of evolutionary computation, specifically genetic algorithms and evolution strategies. The original efforts that evolved finite state machines for predicting arbitrary time series, as well as specific recent efforts in combinatorial and continuous optimization are reviewed. Some areas of current investigation are mentioned, including empirical assessment of the optimization performance of the technique and extensions of the method to include mechanisms to self-adapt to the error surface being searched.