Evolving Efficient Recursive Sorting Algorithms

Object Oriented Genetic Programming (OOGP) is applied to the task of evolving general recursive sorting algorithms. We studied the effects of language primitives and fitness functions on the success of the evolutionary process. For language primitives, these were the methods of a simple list processing package. Five different fitness functions based on sequence disorder were evaluated. The time complexity of the successfully evolved algorithms was measured experimentally in terms of the number of method invocations made, and for the best evolved individuals this was best approximated as O(n times log(n)). This is the first time that sorting algorithms of this complexity have been evolved.