Long-term evolution of genetic programming populations
William B. Langdon · Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion · 2017
Evolving binary mux-6 trees for up to 100 000 generations, during which some programs grow to more than a hundred million nodes, suggests the landscape which GP explores contains some very smooth regions. Although the GP population evolves under crossover, our unbounded GP appears not to evolve building blocks. We do see periods of tens even hundreds of generations where even although each member of the population occupies a different point in the genotypic search space, they are lie at exactly the same point in the phenotypic landscape. Phenotypic convergence whilst retaining genotypic diversity is typical of GP and, we suggest inherent in highly redundant variable length representations.