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Evolving Recursive Programs using Non-recursive Scaffolding

Moraglio, Alberto, Otero, Fernando E.B., Johnson, Colin G., Thompson, Simon, Freitas, Alex A. (2012) Evolving Recursive Programs using Non-recursive Scaffolding. In: Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence. . pp. 1596-1603. (KAR id:30810)

Abstract

Genetic programming has proven capable of evolving solutions to a wide variety of problems. However, the successes have largely been with programs without iteration or recursion; evolving recursive programs has turned out to be particularly challenging. The main obstacle to evolving recursive programs seems to be that they are particularly fragile to the application of search operators: a small change in a correct recursive program generally produces a completely wrong program. In this paper, we present a simple and general method that allows us to pass back and forth from a recursive program to an associated non-recursive program. Finding a recursive program can be reduced to evolving non-recursive programs followed by converting the optimum non-recursive program found to the associated optimum recursive program. This avoids the fragility problem above, as evolution does not search the space of recursive programs. We present promising experimental results on a test-bed of recursive problems.

Item Type: Conference or workshop item (Paper)
Uncontrolled keywords: Genetic Programming; Evolutionary Algorithms; Recursion
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics (inc Computing science) > QA 76 Software, computer programming,
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User: Alex Freitas
Date Deposited: 21 Sep 2012 09:49 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 10:08 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/30810 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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