Automatic generation of object-oriented programs using genetic programming

  • Authors:

  • Wilker Shane Bruce

  • Affiliations:

  • Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

  • Venue:
  • GECCO '96 Proceedings of the 1st annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
  • Year:
  • 1996

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Abstract

This research addresses the application of genetic programming to the generation of object-oriented programs. An extended chromosome data structure is presented where the set of methods associated with an object is stored as an array of program trees. Modified genetic operators are defined to manipulate this structure. Indexed memory is used to allow the programs generated by the system to access and modify object memory. These extensions to the standard genetic programming environment result in a system that can simultaneously generate all of the methods associated with an object. Experiments were performed to compare sequential generation of individual object methods with two variants of simultaneous generation. The first variant used information about both method return values and object internal memory state in its fitness function. The second variant used information about method return values only. It was found that simultaneous generation of methods is possible in the domain of simple collection objects both with and without the availability of internal memory state in the fitness function. It was also found that this technique when successful is several orders of magnitude more computationally expensive in terms of number of individuals generated in the search than the sequential generation of individual methods.