Sferes2 – documentation

Sferes2 is a framework for evolutionary computation (EC) experiments and especially for evolutionary robotics (ER). Its main goal is to help researchers in EC and ER to efficiently try new ideas. Sferes2 has been inspired by sferes (http://sferes.lip6.fr), another (older and no more maintained) framework for ER.

Sferes2 allows to design efficient programs on modern (multicore) computers: our experiments typically require more than 24 hours of computation; in this situation it can be profitable to trade some complexity of implementation for some hours of computation. Nevertheless, we try to keep the framework as simple as possible. More specifically, the following choices were made in the initial design:

• use of modern c++ techniques (template-based programming) to employ object-oriented programming without the cost of virtual functions;
• use of Intel TBB to take full advantages of multicore and SMP systems;
• use of boost libraries when it's useful (shared_ptr, serialization, filesystem, test,…);
• use of MPI to distribute the computational cost on clusters;
• a full set of unit tests;
• no configuration file: a fully optimized executable is built for each particular experiment.

This documentation assumes that the reader is reasonably familiar with evolutionary algorithms. For references you can check the following books about evolutionary computation:

• Deb, K. (2001). Multi-Objective Optimization Using Evolutionary Algorithms. Wiley.
• De Jong, K. A. (2002). Evolutionary Computation. The MIT Press.

• Downloading sferes2
• How to compile sferes2 on your system
• A basic tutorial/example
• A reference manual / guide to the source code