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

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

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

Access and setup Download from http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/plus/ec/ecj/ Get the documentation from http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/plus/ec/ecj/docs/ Delete the package “teambots” unless you want to do more research about it

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

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 www.eclipse.org Import from file system, make sure you filter just the *.java

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.