Evolving Turing-Complete Programs for a Register Machine with Self-modifying Code
Peter C. Nordin, Wolfgang Banzhaf · 1995
The majority of commercial computers today are register machines of von Neumann type. We have developed a method to evolve Turing-complete programs for a register machine. The described implementation enables the use of most program constructs, such as arithmetic operators, large indexed memory, automatic decomposition into subfunctions and subroutines (ADFs), conditional constructs i.e. if-then-else, jumps, loop structures, recursion, protected functions, string and list functions. Any C-function can be compiled and linked into the function set of the system. The use of register machine language allows us to work at the lowest level of binary machine code without any interpreting steps. In a von Neumann machine, programs and data reside in the same memory and the genetic operators can thus directly manipulate the binary machine code in memory. The genetic operators themselves are written in C-language but they modify individuals in binary representation. The result is an execution spe...