DNAgents: Genetically Engineered Intelligent Mobile Agents

Mobile agents are a useful paradigm for network coding providing many advantages and disadvantages. Unfortunately, widespread adoption of mobile agents has been hampered by the disadvantages, which could be said to outweigh the advantages. There is a variety of ongoing work to address these issues, and this is discussed. Ultimately, genetic algorithms are selected as the most interesting potential avenue. Genetic algorithms have many potential benefits for mobile agents. The primary benefit is the potential for agents to become even more adaptive to situational changes in the environment and/or emergent security risks. There are secondary benefits such as the natural obfuscation of functions inherent to genetic algorithms. Pitfalls also exist, namely the difficulty of defining a satisfactory fitness function and the variable execution time of mobile agents arising from the fact that it exists on a network. DNAgents 1.0, an original application of genetic algorithms to mobile agents is implemented and discussed, and serves to highlight these difficulties. Modifications of traditional genetic algorithms are also discussed. Ultimately, a combination of genetic algorithms and artificial life is considered to be the most appropriate approach to mobile agents. This allows the consideration of agents to be organisms, and the network to be their environment. Towards this end, a novel framework called DNAgents 2.0 is designed and implemented. This framework allows the continual evolution of agents in a network without having a seperate training and deployment phase. Parameters for this new framework were defined and explored. Lastly, an experiment similar to DNAgents 1.0 is performed for comparative purposes against DNAgents 1.0 and to prove the viability of this new framework

Motivation and Framework for Using Genetic Algorithms for Microcode Compaction

Genetic algorithms are a robust adaptive optimization technique based on a biological paradigm. They perform efficient search on poorly-defined spaces by maintaining an ordered pool of strings that represent regions in the search space. New strings are produced from existing strings using the genetic-based operators of recombinationand mutation. Combining these operators with natural selection results in the efficient use of hyperplane information found in the problem to guide the search. The searches are not greatly influenced by local optima or non-continuous functions. Genetic algorithms have been successfully used in problems such as the traveling salesperson and scheduling job shops. Microcode compaction can be modeled as these same types of problems, which motivates the application of genetic algorithms in this domain. 1 Introduction Microcode compaction techniques have been based on heuristics thought to produce the shortest final code sequences. In Landskov et al. [LDSM80] th..