Article,
A Perl Primer for Evolutionary Algorithm Practitioners
SIGEVOlution, 4 (4): 12--19 (March 2010)
DOI: 10.1145/1810136.1810138
Abstract
It is curious that the Perl language is not widely used within the Evolutionary Algorithms community, since the main virtues of a Perl programmer can also be applied to the general EA practitioner. These virtues are Impatience, Laziness and Hubris 3, and it is evident that we try to evolve something from the initial, random, chaos, appearing then as godlike creatures to our humble chromosomes with high fitness, thus being prone to the most important of the triad, Hubris. And who's not to say that evolutionary algorithms are for lazy slobs? Instead of devising an analytical solution to a problem, or greedily building it piece by painstaking and carefully designed piece, we just cobble together a fitness function and let the evolutionary algorithm have a go at the problem. If anything, we might fiddle a bit with operator rates, but not much more; we do not even care about understanding the problem (we leave that for memetic algorithm practitioners). Just the fitness, ma'am, no need to do any hard work.
