Genotype–phenotype mapping implications for genetic programming representation:commentary on “On the mapping of genotype to phenotype in evolutionary algorithms” by Peter A. Whigham, Grant Dick, and James Maclaurin

Abstract

This comment refers to the article available at doi:10.1007/s10710-017-9288-x. Here we comment on the article “On the mapping of genotype to phenotype in evolutionary algorithms,” by Peter A. Whigham, Grant Dick, and James Maclaurin. The article reasons about analogies from molecular biology to evolutionary algorithms and discusses conditions for biological adaptations in the context of grammatical evolution, which provide a useful perspective to GP practitioners. However, the connection of the listed implications for GP is not sufficiently convincing for the reader . Therefore this commentary will (1) examine the proposed principles one by one, challenging the authors to provide more supporting evidence where felt that this was needed, and (2) propose a methodical way to GP practitioners to apply these principles when designing GP representations.