History
The 1966 book, "Artificial Intelligence Through Simulated Evolution"
by Fogel, Owens and Walsh is the landmark publication for EP
applications, although many other papers appear earlier in the
literature. In the book, finite state automata were evolved to
predict symbol strings generated from Markov processes and non-
stationary time series. Such evolutionary prediction was motivated
by a recognition that prediction is a keystone to intelligent
behavior (defined in terms of adaptive behavior, in that the
intelligent organism must anticipate events in order to adapt
behavior in light of a goal).
In 1992, the First Annual Conference on EVOLUTIONARY PROGRAMMING was
held in La Jolla, CA. Further conferences have been held annually
(See Q12). The conferences attract a diverse group of academic,
commercial and military researchers engaged in both developing the
theory of the EP technique and in applying EP to a wide range of
OPTIMIZATION problems, both in engineering and biology.
Rather than list and analyze the sources in detail, several
fundamental sources are listed below which should serve as good
pointers to the entire body of work in the field.
Like both ES and GAs, EP is a useful method of OPTIMIZATION when
other techniques such as gradient descent or direct, analytical
discovery are not possible. Combinatoric and real-valued FUNCTION
OPTIMIZATION in which the OPTIMIZATION surface or FITNESS landscape
is "rugged", possessing many locally optimal solutions, are well
suited for EVOLUTIONARY PROGRAMMING.