School of Computing

Evolving program trees with limited scope variable declarations

Tom Castle and Colin G. Johnson

In Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Brisbane, Australia, June 2012. IEEE Press.

Abstract

Variables are a fundamental component of computer programs. However, rarely has the construction of new variables been left to the evolutionary process of a tree-based Genetic Programming system. We present a series of modifications to an existing GP approach to allow the evolution of high-level imperative programs with limited scope variables. We make use of several new program constructs made possible by the modifications and experimentally compare their use. Our results suggest the impact of variable declarations is problem dependent, but can potentially improve performance. It is proposed that the use of variable declarations can reduce the degree of insight required into potential solutions.

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Bibtex Record

@inproceedings{3213,
author = {Tom Castle and Colin G. Johnson},
title = {Evolving Program Trees with Limited Scope Variable Declarations},
month = {June},
year = {2012},
pages = {},
keywords = {genetic programming, imperative, sfgp, variables},
note = {},
doi = {},
url = {http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2012/3213},
    publication_type = {inproceedings},
    submission_id = {18648_1336933382},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation},
    address = {Brisbane, Australia},
    publisher = {IEEE Press},
    refereed = {yes},
}

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