We present an investigation into the genotypephenotype map in Position Independent Grammatical Evolution (?GE). Previous studies have shown ?GE to exhibit a performance increase over standard Grammatical Evolution (GE). The only difference between the two approaches is in how the genotype-phenotype mapping process is performed. GE uses a leftmost non terminal expansion, while ?GE evolves the order of mapping as well as the content. In this study, we use the idea of focused search to examine which aspect of the ?GE mapping process provides the lift in performance over standard GE by applying our approaches to three benchmark problems taken from specialised literature. We examined the traditional ?GE approach and compared it to two setups which examined the extremes of mapping order search and content search, and against setups with varying ratios of content and order search. In all of these tests a purely content focused ?GE was shown to exhibit a performance gain over the other setups.

This research is based upon works supported by the Science Foundation Ireland under Grant No. 08/IN.1/I1868. MN thanks the National Digital Research Centre for funding support.

Barcelona, Spain

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