I'm using the Grammatical Evolution (GE) package in ECJ (ec.gp.ge.*) to evolve the control structure of an agent in a multi-agent system. This approach seems to be working fairly well. However, my choice for using GE was rather arbitrary and I would like to compare my current implementation using GE to other GGGP (Grammar Guided GP) solutions.

The reason that I want to conduct this comparison is because I'm in doubt if GE is the best representation for my problem. For example, in [1] GE is outperformed by GP on the Santa Fe Ant Trail problem. Because the Santa Fe Ant Trail problem is in the agent domain, I suspect that GP might be better for my agent problem as well.

There are two GGGP representations which I would like to use in my implementation, and therefore in ECJ. One is 'plain' grammar guided GP and the other is tree adjoining grammars (TAG). According to [2], one of the benefits of using TAGs is: "The TAG transformation permits local dependencies in the genotype space to map to long-distance dependencies in the intermediate phenotype space in a controlled way, corresponding to the structure of the grammar."

In short my questions are:

If other GGGP implementations do not exist, I'm thinking of developing them as extensions to ECJ in the future.

1. OʼNeill, M. and Ryan, C. Grammatical Evolution. Evolutionary Computation 5, 4 (2001), 349-358.

2. McKay, R.I., Hoai, N.X., Whigham, P.A., Shan, Y., and O’Neill, M. Grammar-based Genetic Programming: a survey. Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines 11, 3-4 (2010), 365-396.

Best regards,

Rinde van Lon