Investigating Degenerate Code and Gene Dependency in the GAuGE System

The 2003 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference -(GECCO 2003): The 2nd Grammatical Evolution Workshop (GEWS 2003), Chicago, Ilinois, USA, 12-16 July 2003This paper explores the topics of gene dependency and degenerate code, and their combined effect in the GAuGE system, a recently introduced position-independent genetic algorithm. To do so, a simulation was used to calculate the average position specifications of all genotype individuals, and the effect of degnerate code on these averages. The results obtained so far suggest that the introduction of degenerate code loosens the dependency between the position coding genes in each individual