Automated design of algorithms and genetic improvement: contrast and commonalities

Abstract

Automated Design of Algorithms (ADA) and Genetic Improvement (GI) are two relatively young fields of research that have been receiving more attention in recent years. Both methodologies can improve programs using evolutionary search methods and successfully produce human competitive programs. ADA and GI are used for improving functional properties such as quality of solution and non-functional properties, e.g. speed, memory and, energy consumption. Only GI of the two has been used to fix bugs, probably because it is applied globally on the whole source code while ADA typically replaces a function or a method locally. While GI is applied directly to the source code ADA works ex-situ, i.e. as a separate process from the program it is improving. Although the methodologies overlap in many ways they differ on some fundamentals and for further progress to be made researchers from both disciplines should be aware of each other's work.