1. ECJ Overview Suggested Plan Access and setup Tutorials and examples
Eclipse
FYI

2. Overview Java based Very powerful
LaTeX option for fancy trees
Some reading and experimentation is necessary

3. Suggested Plan Download Decide on a development environment Eclipse
Text editor
Your favorite IDE
Introduction
Read ECJ Homepage
Briefly read parameter files
Look at Tutorial 1 at least
Tutorial 4 and examples
Closely follow 4
Perform some examples
Create your own simple example
Begin work on your final project

4. Access and setup
Download from
Get the documentation from
Delete the package “teambots” unless you want to do more research about it

5. Tutorials and examples
You should read through Tutorial 1 and Tutorial 4 at least.
You must not skip Tutorial 4
Read slowly as this is the very core of understanding the classes used to represent the individuals you will evolve
There are over 20 different GP examples
Artificial ant, Boolean multiplexer, lawn-mowers, even-odd parity, etc.
Understand the details of the simple examples before you move on

6. Eclipse
Just a suggestion – don’t use this unless you feel like you want to invest the time in getting a very nice IDE
Download from
Import from file system, make sure you filter just the *.java

7. FYI
ECJ does not class-distinguish between functions and terminals . Rather, terminals are just 0-arity functions.
Parameter files can seem very complicated – they are really just an inheritance model implemented across a set of text files – but this can be confusing when you first look through it. Read through the “about parameter files” and trace through the ones used for a simple example.