ECJ at 20
Eric O. Scott, Sean Luke · Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion · 2019
ECJ is now 20 years old. Begun as a genetic programming and evolutionary computation library in Java, it has since established itself as historically one of the most popular EC toolkits worldwide. In 2016 we received a National Science Foundation grant to improve ECJ in many ways with an eye toward making it a useful toolkit not just for EC but for the broader metaheuristics community. This paper is a report on our efforts to this end. We discuss new metaheuristics frameworks and representations added to ECJ and the design challenges that they raise for a general-purpose framework, as well as testing facilities and other support tools. We conclude with our future directions for the library.