Genetic algorithms are founded upon the principle of evolution, i.e., survival of the fittest. Hence evolution programming techniques, based on genetic algorithms, are applicable to many hard optimization problems, such as optimization of functions with linear and nonlinear constraints, the traveling salesman problem, and problems of scheduling, partitioning, and control. The importance of these techniques is still growing, since evolution programs are parallel in nature, and parallelism is one of the most promising directions in computer science. The book is self-contained and the only prerequisite is basic undergraduate mathematics. This third edition has been substantially revised and extended by three new chapters and by additional appendices containing working material to cover recent developments and a change in the perception of evolutionary computation.

Computers that `program themselves' has long been an aim of computer scientists. Recently genetic programming (GP) has started to show its promise by automatically evolving programs. Indeed in a small number of problems GP has evolved programs whose performance is similar to or even slightly better than that of programs written by people. The main thrust of GP has been to automatically create functions. While these can be of great use they contain no memory and relatively little work has addressed automatic creation of program code including stored data. This issue is the main focus of Genetic Programming, and Data Structures: Genetic Programming + Data Structures = Automatic Programming!. This book is motivated by the observation from software engineering that data abstraction (e.g., via abstract data types) is essential in programs created by human programmers. This book shows that abstract data types can be similarly beneficial to the automatic production of programs using GP. Genetic Programming and Data Structures: Genetic Programming + Data Structures = Automatic Programming! shows how abstract data types (stacks, queues and lists) can be evolved using genetic programming, demonstrates how GP can evolve general programs which solve the nested brackets problem, recognises a Dyck context free language, and implements a simple four function calculator. In these cases, an appropriate data structure is beneficial compared to simple indexed memory. This book also includes a survey of GP, with a critical review of experiments with evolving memory, and reports investigations of real world electrical network maintenance scheduling problems that demonstrate that Genetic Algorithms can find low cost viable solutions to such problems. Genetic Programming and Data Structures: Genetic Programming + Data Structures = Automatic Programming! should be of direct interest to computer scientists doing research on genetic programming, genetic algorithms, data structures, and artificial intelligence. In addition, this book will be of interest to practitioners working in all of these areas and to those interested in automatic programming.

'What does your Master teach?' asked a visitor. 'Nothing,' said the disciple. 'Then why does he give discourses?' 'He only points the way - he teaches nothing.' Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom During the last three decades there has been a growing interest in algorithms which rely on analogies to natural processes. The emergence of massively par allel computers made these algorithms of practical interest. The best known algorithms in this class include evolutionary programming, genetic algorithms, evolution strategies, simulated annealing, classifier systems, and neural net works. Recently (1-3 October 1990) the University of Dortmund, Germany, hosted the First Workshop on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature [164]. This book discusses a subclass of these algorithms - those which are based on the principle of evolution (survival of the fittest). In such algorithms a popu lation of individuals (potential solutions) undergoes a sequence of unary (muta tion type) and higher order (crossover type) transformations. These individuals strive for survival: a selection scheme, biased towards fitter individuals, selects the next generation. After some number of generations, the program converges - the best individual hopefully represents the optimum solution. There are many different algorithms in this category. To underline the sim ilarities between them we use the common term "evolution programs" .

Computers that `program themselves' has long been an aim of computer scientists. Recently genetic programming (GP) has started to show its promise by automatically evolving programs. Indeed in a small number of problems GP has evolved programs whose performance is similar to or even slightly better than that of programs written by people. The main thrust of GP has been to automatically create functions. While these can be of great use they contain no memory and relatively little work has addressed automatic creation of program code including stored data. This issue is the main focus of Genetic Programming, and Data Structures: Genetic Programming + Data Structures = Automatic Programming!. This book is motivated by the observation from software engineering that data abstraction (e.g., via abstract data types) is essential in programs created by human programmers. This book shows that abstract data types can be similarly beneficial to the automatic production of programs using GP. Genetic Programming and Data Structures: Genetic Programming + Data Structures = Automatic Programming! shows how abstract data types (stacks, queues and lists) can be evolved using genetic programming, demonstrates how GP can evolve general programs which solve the nested brackets problem, recognises a Dyck context free language, and implements a simple four function calculator. In these cases, an appropriate data structure is beneficial compared to simple indexed memory. This book also includes a survey of GP, with a critical review of experiments with evolving memory, and reports investigations of real world electrical network maintenance scheduling problems that demonstrate that Genetic Algorithms can find low cost viable solutions to such problems. Genetic Programming and Data Structures: Genetic Programming + Data Structures = Automatic Programming! should be of direct interest to computer scientists doing research on genetic programming, genetic algorithms, data structures, and artificial intelligence. In addition, this book will be of interest to practitioners working in all of these areas and to those interested in automatic programming.