Refactoring the Genetic Code for Increased Evolvability

Refactoring the Genetic Code for Increased Evolvability

The standard genetic code is robust to mutations during transcription and translation. Point mutations are likely to be synonymous or to preserve the chemical properties of the original amino acid. Saturation mutagenesis experiments suggest that in some cases the best-performing mutant requires replacement of more than a single nucleotide within a codon. These replacements are essentially inacc...

Package Evolvability and its Relationship with Refactoring

In this paper, we address a set of research questions investigating trends in changes to an open-source system (OSS). An interesting ‘peak and trough’ effect trend was found to exist in the system studied, suggesting that developer activity comprises of a set of high and low periods. Trends in overall changes applied to the system were complemented with empirical evidence in refactoring data fo...

Refactoring Code to Increase

Refactoring Prolog Code

Refactoring is a popular technique from the OO-community to restructure code: it aims at improving software readability, maintainability and extensibility. In this paper we apply the ideas of refactoring to Prolog programs. We present a catalogue of refactorings adapted to or specificly developed for Prolog. We also discuss ViPReSS, our semi-automatic refactoring browser, and our experience wit...

Code Factoring And The Evolution Of Evolvability

Evolvability can be defined as the capacity of a population to evolve. We show that one advantage of Automatically Defined Functions (ADFs) in genetic programming is their ability to increase the evolvability of a population over time. We observe this evolution of evolvability in experiments using genetic programming to solve a symbolic regression problem that varies in a partially unpredictabl...