abstract = "This work uses genetic programming to explore the
space of continuous optimisers, with the goal of
discovering novel ways of doing optimisation. In order
to keep the search space broad, the optimisers are
evolved from scratch using Push, a Turing-complete,
general-purpose, language. The resulting optimisers are
found to be diverse, and explore their optimisation
landscapes using a variety of interesting, and
sometimes unusual, strategies. Significantly, when
applied to problems that were not seen during training,
many of the evolved optimisers generalise well, and
often outperform existing optimisers. This supports the
idea that novel and effective forms of optimisation can
be discovered in an automated manner. This paper also
shows that pools of evolved optimisers can be
hybridised to further increase their generality,
leading to optimisers that perform robustly over a
broad variety of problem types and sizes.",
notes = "supplementary material available at
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-021-09414-8
School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences,
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK",