The Reproductive Plan Language 2 (RPL2) is an extensible interpreted language for writing and using evolutionary computing programs. It supports arbitrary genetic representations, all structured population models described in the literature together with further hybrids, and runs on parallel or serial hardware while hiding parallelism from the user. This paper surveys structured population models, explains and motivates the benefits of generic systems such as RPL2 and describes the suite of applications that have used it to date. 1 Motivation As evolutionary computing techniques acquire greater popularity and are shown to have ever wider application a number of trends have emerged. The emphasis of early work in genetic algorithms on low cardinality representations is diminishing as problem complexities increase and people find it more convenient and effective to use more natural data structures. There is now extensive evidence, both empirical (Davis, 1991; Michalewicz, 1993) and theor...
Patrick D. Surry, Nicholas J. Radcliffe