Grammatical evolution
Grammatical evolution (GE) is an evolutionary computation and, more specifically, a genetic programming (GP) technique (or approach) pioneered by Conor Ryan, JJ Collins and Michael O'Neill in 1998 at the BDS Group in the University of Limerick.
As in any other GP approach, the objective is to find an executable program, program fragment, or function, which will achieve a good fitness value for a given objective function. In most published work on GP, a LISP-style tree-structured expression is directly manipulated, whereas GE applies genetic operators to an integer string, subsequently mapped to a program (or similar) through the use of a grammar, which is typically expressed in Backus–Naur form. One of the benefits of GE is that this mapping simplifies the application of search to different programming languages and other structures.