Instantiating a generic extension of an abstract class

Trying to write some generalised code for Genetic Algorithms and I have an abstract class Genotype as follows:

public abstract class Genotype {
private ArrayList<Gene> genotype = new ArrayList<Gene>();

//...

public Genotype(ArrayList<Gene> genotype) {
    setGenotype(genotype);
    setGenotypeLength(genotype.size());
}

public abstract Phenotype<Gene> getPhenotype();

public abstract void mutate();

//...
}

This class is intended to be extended and the subclass obviously provides the implementation of getPhenotype() and mutate(). However, I also ha开发者_JAVA百科ve a second class that takes two Genotype objects as parameters and returns an ArrayList containing Genotype objects. Since I don't know the type of the extended Genotype objects at this point I need to use a generic parameter as follows:

public class Reproducer {

//...

    private <G extends Genotype> ArrayList<Genotype> crossover(G parent1, G parent2) {
        ArrayList<Genotype> children = new ArrayList<Genotype>();

        ArrayList<Gene> genotypeOne = ArrayListCloner.cloneArrayList(parent1.getGenotype());
        ArrayList<Gene> genotypeTwo = ArrayListCloner.cloneArrayList(parent2.getGenotype());

        //one point crossover
        int p = gen.nextInt(genotypeOne.size());

        for (int i = 0; i < p; i++) {
            genotypeOne.set(i, genotypeOne.get(i));
            genotypeTwo.set(i, genotypeTwo.get(i));
        }
        for (int i = p; i < 10; i++) {
            genotypeOne.set(i, genotypeTwo.get(i));
            genotypeTwo.set(i, genotypeOne.get(i));
        }

        children.add(new G(genotypeOne)); //THROWS ERROR: Cannot instantiate the type G
        children.add(new G(genotypeTwo)); //THROWS ERROR: Cannot instantiate the type G

        return children;
    }
}

However, since I need to return two objects of type G in an ArrayList I clearly have a problem where I can't instantiate the new Genotype objects because they're 1. generic types and presumably 2. abstract.

This might be a bad way of going about things all together but if anyone has a solution that would be great. Thank you.

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I would suggesting using a factory method in your Genotype class

public abstract class Genotype {
     public abstract GenoType newInstance();
}

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You could use an abstract factory pattern. Since you need only one factory method in your factory this is arguably a degenerate case, but it might be what you need. You should pass the factory instance to your Reproducer object, probably as a an argument of some method. It's not pretty, but at least you now have abstraction over object creation.

A better solution would probably be to change your architecture. Why not forget about the Genotype class? Your genotype representation is basically a list of genes. You could make a utility class with (generic) operations on these lists and use these operations in your other classes. The following is a sketch of what I mean:

public static <G extends Gene> List<? extends G> mutate( List<G> genotype ) { ... }
public static <G extends Gene> List<List<? extends G>> crossover( List<G> p1, List<G> p2 ) { ... }

As a side note: favour declaring interface types over class types; in your example you don't use the List interface.

As a final side note: in your example you don't really need the generic type. If you declare the parameter types as Genotype you get the same solution (with the same problem). A type X parameter accepts any object of type X (including subtypes!) as argument.