Implementing an intuitive mutation operator for interactive evolutionary 3D design

Locality - how well neighbouring genotypes correspond to neighbouring phenotypes - has been described as a key element in Evolutionary Computation. Grammatical Evolution (GE) is a generative system as it uses grammar rules to derive a program from an integer encoded genome. The genome, upon which the evolutionary process is carried out, goes through several transformations before it produces an output. The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of locality during the generative process using both qualitative and quantitative techniques. To explore this, we examine the effects of standard GE mutation using distance metrics and conduct a survey of the output designs. There are two different kinds of event that occur during standard GE Mutation. We investigate how each event type affects the locality on different phenotypic stages when applied to the problem of interactive design generation.