J. Roland Olsson - How to Invent Functions (1999)

Context

Learned in this study

Things to explore

• Using EP theory, how does one program "mutate" into another?

Overview

• Adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine are the four basic building blocks of programs (binary blocks)
• Short interspersed nuclear elements (SINEs) = small helper functions
• Abstraction: encapsulating a small program within a function, provided the function accepts an argument
• During large scale program evolution, abstraction is essential for at least the following two reasons:
  1. The user of an automatic programming system should not be required to define all needed help functions. Instead, the user should define a small number of primitives whereas the system automatically constructs a possibly large number of help functions.
  2. The system can construct a help function exactly where it is needed and avoid having a too large scope for the function.
• A form of scope restriction actually seems to exist in DNA since repeats often occur in localized regions
  • For example, the clustering of multiple copies of genes encoding ribosomal RNA in humans
• ADATE uses a so-called cost limit $l$ that says how many children programs are to be produced from a given parent program. An abstraction is assigned a cost $c$ which indicates that $l/c$ programs are to be based on the abstraction
• Discriminate against bodies containing if-tests that do not depend on any parameter

See also

References

• Olsson, J. Roland. "How to invent functions." European Conference on Genetic Programming. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 1999.