- author = "Eric Schulte",
- title = "Neutral Networks of Real-World Programs and their Application to Automated Software Evolution",
- school = "University of New Mexico",
- year = "2014",
- address = "Albuquerque, USA",
- month = jul,
- keywords = "genetic algorithms, genetic programming, genetic improvement",
-
URL = "
http://hdl.handle.net/1928/25819",
-
URL = "https://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/dissertation",
-
URL = "
https://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/dissertation/schulte-dissertation.pdf",
- size = "168 pages",
-
abstract = "The existing software development ecosystem is the
product of evolutionary forces, and consequently
real-world software is amenable to improvement through
automated evolutionary techniques. This dissertation
presents empirical evidence that software is inherently
robust to small randomised program transformations, or
mutations. Simple and general mutation operations are
demonstrated that can be applied to software source
code, compiled assembler code, or directly to binary
executables. These mutations often generate variants of
working programs that differ significantly from the
original, yet remain fully functional. Applying
successive mutations to the same software program
uncovers large neutral networks of fully functional
variants of real-world software projects.
These properties of mutational robustness and the corresponding neutral networks have been studied extensively in biology and are believed to be related to the capacity for unsupervised evolution and adaptation. As in biological systems, mutational robustness and neutral networks in software systems enable automated evolution.
The dissertation presents several applications that leverage software neutral networks to automate common software development and maintenance tasks. Neutral networks are explored to generate diverse implementations of software for improving runtime security and for proactively repairing latent bugs. Next, a technique is introduced for automatically repairing bugs in the assembler and executables compiled from off-the-shelf software. As demonstration, a proprietary executable is manipulated to patch security vulnerabilities without access to source code or any aid from the software vendor. Finally, software neutral networks are leveraged to optimize complex nonfunctional runtime properties. This optimisation technique is used to reduce the energy consumption of the popular PARSEC benchmark applications by 20percent as compared to the best available public domain compiler optimisations.
The applications presented herein apply evolutionary computation techniques to existing software using common software engineering tools. By enabling evolutionary techniques within the existing software development tool chain, this work is more likely to be of practical benefit to the developers and maintainers of real-world software systems.",
