Automatic Re-engineering of Software Using Genetic Programming

This text describes the application of genetic programming to a real world application, area-software re-engineering in general, and automatic parallelization specifically. Unlike most uses of genetic programming, this book evolves sequences of provable transformations rather than actual programs. It demonstrates that the benefits of this approach are twofold: first, the time required for evaluating a population is drastically reduced, and second, the transformations can subsequently be used to prove that the new program is functionally equivalent to the original. The author shows that there are applications where it is more practical to use GP to assist with software engineering rather than to entirely replace it. He also demonstrates how he isolated aspects of a problem that were particularly suited to GP, and used traditional software engineering techniques in those areas for which they were adequate.