I'm looking into evolving code, specifically scripts in languages such as Python and Ruby. Are there existing tools that can take code and use it as an individual in an evolutionary algorithm? obviously you can take the text as an array of letters and work a standard GA on it but I'm looking for something cleverer than that.
Well, you can easily build an AST from the original source code, mutate the AST to obtain still valid ASTs and then regenerate the code.
A good general introduction to Genetic Programming can be freely downloaded from http://www.gp-field-guide.org.uk/.
The web page http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/23451/what-language-to-use-for-genetic-programming, has several useful links related to genetic programming in Python.
Well, you can easily build an AST from the original source code, mutate the AST to obtain still valid ASTs and then regenerate the code.
A good library in Python implementing GPs is DEAP (see link in the attachments). Pyevolve also has support for GP in their latest release. In any case, a search for "Genetic Programming" on their blog return a lot of interesting posts that you can use as a starting point for your own customization.
There are some more recent approachs to programs evolution, e.g. the ones stemming from the Distribution of Estimations Algorithms family, but I do not know of any pre-made tool in Python implementing them.
https://code.google.com/p/deap/
You also can have a look at Grammatical Evolution, a strategy similar to Genetic Programming. I am not aware of exisiting tools, but as far as I know there exist some code in ruby.
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