Examining mutation landscapes in grammar based genetic programming

Representation is a very important component of any evolutionary algorithm. Changing the representation can cause an algorithm to perform very differently. Such a change can have an effect that is difficult to understand. This paper examines what happens to the grammatical evolution algorithm when replacing the commonly used context-free grammar representation with a tree-adjunct grammar representation. We model the landscapes produced when using integer flip mutation with both representations and compare these landscapes using visualisation methods little used in the field of genetic programming.