Evolutionary Design Using Rewriting Systems

This work provides an introduction to the evolutionary algorithms and evolutionary design. It also describes disadvantages of direct encoding of a genotype to a phenotype and a method of nontrivial encoding which can solve these problems. We are particularly talking about the problems of the scalability of evolved solutions. We discuss a possible solution of described problem - a nontrivial genotype-phenotype mapping called development. This technique is demonstrated on an evolutionary design of a sequence of rewriting rules which is able to construct arbitrarily large sorting networks