Genetic Programming in C# [closed]

Answer 1

After developing my own Genetic Programming didactic application, I found a complete Genetic Programming Framework called AForge.NET Genetics. It's a part of the Aforge.NET library. It's licensed under LGPL.

Answer 2

I am reading A Field Guide to Genetic Programming right now (free PDF download). It is also available as a paperback. It discuses the use of a library written in Java called TinyGP. You might get some mileage out of that. I have not started doing any actual programming but am hoping to applies some of the concepts in C#.

Answer 3

I saw a good high-level discussion of it on channel9 by Mike Swanson at http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Algorithms-and-Data-Structures-Mike-Swanson-Genetic-Session-Scheduler/

Answer 4

Do you mean actual genetic programming, as opposed to genetic algorithms in general?

If so, C#/.net isn't the best language for it. LISP, for example, has always been a mainstay of GP.

However, if you must, you're probably going to want to dynamically generate CIL / MSIL. You could do this using System.Reflection.Emit, however I'd recommend Mono.Cecil. It lacks good docs (as if reflection emit has them).. But it offers much better assembly emission and reflection.

Another issue is that it is less than trivial to load code, and later dispose of it, in the .net framework. At least, you cannot unload assemblies. You can unload appdomains, but the whole business of loading code into a seperate appdomain, and calling it externally can get pretty messy. .NET 3.5's System.Addin stuff should make this easier.

Answer 5

I've forked ECJ to C# .NET 4.0 if you are interested in a full-featured Evolutionary Computation framework. The package includes everything from the original ECJ Java project, including all of the working samples.

I also wrote 500 unit tests to verify many aspects of the conversion. But many more tests are needed. In particular, the distributed computation aspects are not fully tested. That's because I plan on converting from ECJ's simple use of sockets to a more robust strategy using WCF and WF. I'll also be reworking the framework to utilize TPL (Task Parallel Library).

Anyway, you can download the initial conversion here:

http://branecloud.codeplex.com

I am also in the process of converting several other frameworks from Java to .NET that relate to "synthetic intelligence" research (when I can find the time).

Ben

Answer 6

MSDN had an article last year about genetic programming: Genetic Algorithms: Survival of the Fittest with Windows Forms