Attribute Grammar Evolution

摘要

This paper describes Attribute Grammar Evolution (AGE), a new Automatic Evolutionary Programming algorithm that extends standard Grammar Evolution (GE) by replacing context-free grammars by attribute grammars. GE only takes into account syntactic restrictions to generate valid individuals. AGE adds semantics to ensure that both semantically and syntactically valid individuals are generated. Attribute grammars make it possible to semantically describe the solution. The paper shows empirically that AGE is as good as GE for a classical problem, and proves that including semantics in the grammar can improve GE performance. An important conclusion is that adding too much semantics can make the search difficult.