An Investigation into the Use of Different Search Strategies with Grammatical Evolution

We present an investigation into the performance of Grammatical Evolution using a number of different search strategies, Simulated Annealing, Hill Climbing, Random Search and Genetic Algorithms. Comparative results on three different problems are examined. We analyse the nature of the search spaces presented by these problems and offer an explanation for the contrasting performance of each of the search strategies. Our results show that Genetic Algorithms provide a consistent level of performance across all three problems successfully coping with sensitivity of the system to discrete changes in the selection of productions from the associated grammar.