DEAP: enabling nimbler evolutions

DEAP is a Distributed Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) framework written in Python and designed to help researchers developing custom evolutionary algorithms. Its design philosophy promotes explicit algorithms and transparent data structures, in contrast with most other evolutionary computation softwares that tend to encapsulate standardized algorithms using the black-box approach. This philosophy sets it apart as a rapid prototyping framework for testing of new ideas in EA research. An executable notebook version of this paper is available at https://github.com/DEAP/notebooks.