0000000000602939

AUTHOR

Léo Françoso Dal Piccol Sotto

A study on graph representations for genetic programming

Graph representations promise several desirable properties for Genetic Programming (GP); multiple-output programs, natural representations of code reuse and, in many cases, an innate mechanism for neutral drift. Each graph GP technique provides a program representation, genetic operators and overarching evolutionary algorithm. This makes it difficult to identify the individual causes of empirical differences, both between these methods and in comparison to traditional GP. In this work, we empirically study the behavior of Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP), Linear Genetic Programming (LGP), Evolving Graphs by Graph Programming (EGGP) and traditional GP. By fixing some aspects of the config…

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On the role of non-effective code in linear genetic programming

In linear variants of Genetic Programming (GP) like linear genetic programming (LGP), structural introns can emerge, which are nodes that are not connected to the final output and do not contribute to the output of a program. There are claims that such non-effective code is beneficial for search, as it can store relevant and important evolved information that can be reactivated in later search phases. Furthermore, introns can increase diversity, which leads to higher GP performance. This paper studies the role of non-effective code by comparing the performance of LGP variants that deal differently with non-effective code for standard symbolic regression problems. As we find no decrease in p…

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An Analysis of the Influence of Noneffective Instructions in Linear Genetic Programming

Abstract Linear Genetic Programming (LGP) represents programs as sequences of instructions and has a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) dataflow. The results of instructions are stored in registers that can be used as arguments by other instructions. Instructions that are disconnected from the main part of the program are called noneffective instructions, or structural introns. They also appear in other DAG-based GP approaches like Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP). This article studies four hypotheses on the role of structural introns: noneffective instructions (1) serve as evolutionary memory, where evolved information is stored and later used in search, (2) preserve population diversity, (3)…

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