Exploiting co-evolution and a modified island model to climb the Core War hill

In this paper, Core War, a very peculiar game popular in mid 80's, is exploited as a benchmark to improve the /spl mu/GP, an evolutionary algorithm able to generate touring-complete, realistic assembly programs. Two techniques were analyzed: coevolution and a modified island model. Experimental results showed that the former is essential in the beginning of the evolutionary process, but may be deceptive in the end. Differently, the latter enables focusing the search on specific region of the search space and lead to dramatic improvements. The use of both techniques to help the /spl mu/GP in its real task (test program generation for microprocessor) is currently being evaluated.