Genetic Programming

This page covers the bare essentials of genetic programming: which books to read, where to find papers, where to ask questions, where to publish, what tools and techniques to use, and where to do research in the UK.

Reference

A selection of introductory GP reference books:

• A Field Guide to Genetic Programming, by Riccardo Poli, Bill Langdon and Nic McPhee
  Up-to-date and freely downloadable book written by leading GP researchers.
• Essentials of Metaheuristics, by Sean Luke
  Covers GP and much more. Written by another leading GP researcher.
• Genetic Programming, by John Koza
  John Koza's original GP reference book from 1992.
• Genetic Programming: An Introduction, by Wolfgang Banzhaf et al.
  A good introductory reference book from 1998.

Papers

• The Genetic Programming Bibliography
  References almost every GP paper ever published.

Mailing Lists

• Genetic Programming at Yahoo Groups
  The closest thing to an official mailing list, this has been going for well over a decade.
• comp.ai.genetic
  Mostly limited to calls for papers these days.

Conferences

These are the best-known GP conferences. For a more extensive list, see here.

• European Conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP)
  Perhaps the most focused and well-known GP event.
• Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO)
  One of the largest evolutionary computing events, with a dedicated GP track.
• IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC)
  The other largest evolutionary computing event, also host to a lot of GP papers.

Common Variants

These are commonly seen variants of standard tree-based genetic programming.

• Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP)
  A popular graph-based variant of GP.
• Gene Expression Programming
  Doesn't consider itself to be GP, but has much in common.
• Grammatical Evolution
  A grammar-based variant of GP.
• Linear Genetic Programming
  A form of GP in which programs are sequences of instructions.

Software

A small selection of GP libraries which have stood the test of time:

• ECJ: Evolutionary Computation in Java
  Extensive Java-based evolutionary computation library with good GP support.
• Open BEAGLE
  A popular C++ library for evolutionary computation.
• GPLAB
  A genetic programming toolbox for MATLAB.

Some scripts for formatting GP expressions:

• Bill Langdon's gawk code
  
• A Perl script by Peter Ross
  

UK Research Groups

A selection of well-known UK-based research groups working in GP and related fields:

• Natural Computation Group, University of Birmingham
  
• Intelligent Systems Group, University of Essex
  
• Bioanalytical Sciences Group, University of Manchester
  
• Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning, University of Nottingham
  
• Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems, University of Sussex
  
• Intelligent Systems Group, University of York