As part of GEVA Week ’08 James Murphy evolved a controller for a Hamster Ball by applying forces to the ball to steer its path through a maze of falling blocks. The number, order, size and direction of the forces to apply were evolved using Grammatical Evolution and ODE adopted as the Physics Engine. The short video demos the application.

Hamster Run with GEVA

Development Team: Michael O'Neill, Erik Hemberg, Jonathan Byrne, James McDermott, David Fagan, John Mark Swafford, Eoin Murphy, Conor Gilligan, Eliott Bartley, Anthony Brabazon

GEVA is an implementation of Grammatical Evolution in Java developed at UCD's Natural Computing Research & Applications group. As well as providing the characteristic genotype-phenotype mapper of GE a search algorithm engine, and GUI are also provided. Currently a variable-length integer encoding Evolutionary Algorithm search engine is provided.

•Download v2.0 Release (Released under GNU GPL)

Running GEVA out-of-the-box

GEVA Documentation explaining how to install and run GEVA, also published as a UCD School of Computer Science & Informatics Technical Report UCD-CSI-2008-09


GEVA Community Google Group and Email list


GEVA Source Code Code repository


Download Blender Shape Grammar

Download Installer for GEVA plugin for Blender (Windows 7 and Vista)

Article in SIGEVOlution on GEVA

As part of ODCSSS ’08 John Reddin developed the Elevated Pitch software which used GEVA to automatically compose music. A sample of evolved music is provided.

Elevated Pitch with GEVA

The NCRA group logo was evolved using Grammatical Evolution using a Lindenmayer system grammar and output in the Postscript language. The resulting work was published in IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation in 2008.  An alternative implementation is provided as a demo problem in GEVA.  A poster describing the Logo evolution is provided.

Evolving a Logo Design with GEVA

DrumBalls was the winning project of GEVA Week ’09 by James Murphy. When a Sounder Ball strikes a Drum Ball a drum sound is generated. GE was used to evolve ball motion patterns to generate a desired rhythm. The short video demos the application.

DrumBalls with GEVA