Product Description

Genetic programming (GP), one of the most advanced forms of evolutionary computation, has been highly successful as a technique for getting computers to automatically solve problems without having to tell them explicitly how. Since its inceptions more than ten years ago, GP has been used to solve practical problems in a variety of application fields. Along with this ad-hoc engineering approaches interest increased in how and why GP works. This book provides a coherent consolidation of recent work on the theoretical foundations of GP. A concise introduction to GP and genetic algorithms (GA) is followed by a discussion of fitness landscapes and other theoretical approaches to natural and artificial evolution. Having surveyed early approaches to GP theory it presents new exact schema analysis, showing that it applies to GP as well as to the simpler GAs. New results on the potentially infinite number of possible programs are followed by two chapters applying these new techniques.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1170633 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 260 pages

Customer Reviews

Excellent review of the state of the art
I have found this book very good and inspiring. This book is about theoretical and empirical studies on the fundamental question of how and why genetic programming works.
In this respect the title of the book is very appropriate. The book should not be expected to be an introduction to genetic programming for beginners, as the author of another review seem to believe.
With respect to that review, I also disagree with the statement that the book is just a collection of papers. While it is true that the results in the book have been published before, the authors have made an incredible effort to integrate those results into a single coherent picture, which I have enjoyed very much viewing.
Not for beginners, but definitely cutting edge high quality research.

Not really that good
It's nice to have a new book on genetic programming. Too bad though that the title really is not very accurate IMO. The book does not really give foundations of GP. It does have theory but the theory does not seem practical. Since this is half the book, I find it disappointing. The second half of the book is a bit better, but again it is not really treating foundations. Instead, it treats very specialised subtopics. It also seems that the book is a collection of papers that the authors have published, so you could get much of this in other places. Since the book is not very original, and the theory is overly complex and not really useful (the book does not say how to use it IMO) I think the book by Banzhaf on GP is much better, even if it is older.