Exploiting reflection in object oriented genetic programming

Abstract

Most programs currently written by humans are object-oriented ones. Two of the greatest benefits of object oriented programming are the separation of interface from implementation, and the notion that an object may have state. This paper describes a simple system that enables object-oriented programs to be evolved. The system exploits reflection to automatically discover features about the environment (the existing classes and objects) in which it is to operate. This enables us to evolve object-oriented programs for the given problem domain with the minimum of effort. Currently, we are only evolving method implementations. Future work will explore how we can also evolve interfaces and classes, which should be beneficial to the automatic generation of structured solutions to complex problems. We demonstrate the system with the aid of an evolutionary art example. © Springer-Verlag 2004.