A fine-grained view of GP locality with binary decision diagrams as ant phenotypes

  • Authors:
  • James McDermott;Edgar Galván-Lopéz;Michael O'Neill

  • Affiliations:
  • University College Dublin, Ireland;University College Dublin, Ireland;University College Dublin, Ireland

  • Venue:
  • PPSN'10 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Parallel problem solving from nature: Part I
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The property that neighbouring genotypes tend to map to neighbouring phenotypes, i.e. locality, is an important criterion in the study of problem difficulty. Locality is problematic in tree-based genetic programming (GP), since typically there is no explicit phenotype. Here, we define multiple phenotypes for the artificial ant problem, and use them to describe a novel fine-grained view of GP locality. This allows us to identify the mapping from an ant's behavioural phenotype to its concrete path as being inherently non-local, and show that therefore alternative genetic encodings and operators cannot make the problem easy. We relate this to the results of evolutionary runs.