Gene duplication to enable genetic programming to concurrently evolve both the architecture and work-performing steps of a computer program
John R. Koza · 1995
Susumu Ohno's provocative book Evolution by Gene Duplication proposed that the creation of new proteins in nature (and hence new structures and new behaviors in living things) begins with a gene duplication and that gene duplication is "the major force of evolution. " This paper describes six new architecture-altering operations for genetic programming that are patterned after the naturally-occurring chromosomal operations of gene duplication and gene deletion. When these new operations are included in a run of genetic programming, genetic programming can dynamically change, during the run, the architecture of a multi-part program consisting of a main program and a set of hierarchically-called subprograms. These on-the-fly architectural changes occur while genetic programming is concurrently evolving the work-performing steps of the main program and the hierarchically-called subprograms. The new operations can be interpreted as an automated way to change the representation of a problem while solving the problem. Equivalently, these operations can be viewed as an automated way to decompose a problem into an non-pre-specified number of subproblems of non-pre-specified dimensionality; solve the subproblems; and assemble the solutions of the subproblems into a solution of the overall problem. These operations can also be interpreted as providing an automated way to specialize and generalize. 1