Polytypic Genetic Programming

Abstract

Abstract. Program synthesis via heuristic search often requires a great deal of 'boilerplate' code to adapt program APIs to the search mechanism. In addition, the majority of existing approaches are not type-safe: i.e. they can fail at runtime because the search mechanisms lack the strict type information often available to the compiler. In this article, we describe Polytope, a Scala framework that uses polytypic programming, a relatively recent advance in program abstraction. Polytope requires a minimum of boilerplate code and supports a form of strongtyping in which type rules are automatically enforced by the compiler, even for search operations such as mutation which are applied at runtime. By operating directly on language-native expressions, it provides an embeddable optimization procedure for existing code. We give a tutorial example of the specific polytypic approach we adopt and compare both runtime efficiency and required lines of code against the well-known EpochX GP framework, showing comparable performance in the former and the complete elimination of boilerplate for the latter.

Dependency Injection for Programming by Optimization

“…Previous work in this area includes Gen-O-Fix [26] and ECSELR [29], both of which are embedded monitor systems that support search via Evolutionary Computation. Templar and Polytope are two alternative approaches to software component generation: Templar [25] provides a 'top-down' framework for orchestrating one or more 'variation points' generated by Genetic Programming, while Polytope [27] uses methods from datatype generic programming to support the 'bottom up' generation of individual variation points in source code.…”