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 strong-typing 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.
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Notes
- 1.
Not to be confused with the weaker notion of abstract data types.
- 2.
We focus on tree-based GP in this paper.
- 3.
The term ‘coproduct’ represents a generalized notion of ‘sum’ inherited from Category Theory.
- 4.
Type constructors in Scala can be infix and composed of non-alphabetic characters.
- 5.
- 6.
as determined by the nonparametric Wilcoxon Signed Rank test.
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Acknowledgements
J. Swan would like to thank Miles Sabin and the contributors to the Scala ‘shapeless’ library. His work on this paper is funded by EPSRC grant EP/J017515/1 (DAASE). K. Krawiec acknowledges support from National Science Centre, Poland, grant 2014/15/B/ST6/05205.
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Swan, J., Krawiec, K., Ghani, N. (2017). Polytypic Genetic Programming. In: Squillero, G., Sim, K. (eds) Applications of Evolutionary Computation. EvoApplications 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10200. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55792-2_5
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