abstract = "Shared grammar evolution (SGE) is a novel scheme for
representing and evolving a population of variable
length programs as a shared set of grammatical
productions. Productions that fail to contribute to
selected solutions can be retained for several
generations beyond their last use. The ensuing
redundancy and its effects are assessed in this paper
on two circuit design tasks associated with random
number generation: finding a recurrent circuit with
maximum period, and reproducing a De Bruijn counter
from a set of seed/output pairs. In both instances,
increasing redundancy leads to significantly higher
success rates, outperforming comparable increases in
population size. The results support previous studies
that have shown that representational redundancy can be
beneficial to evolutionary search. However, redundancy
promotes an increase in further redundancy by
encouraging the creation of large offspring, the
evaluation of which is computationally costly. This
observation should generalise to any unconstrained
variablelength representation and therefore represents
a notable drawback of redundancy in evolution.",
notes = "CEC 2007 - A joint meeting of the IEEE, the EPS, and
the IET.