A study in program response and the negative effects of introns in genetic programming
The standard method of obtaining a response in tree-based genetic programming is to take the value returned by the root node. In non-tree representations, alternate methods have been explored. One alternative is to treat a specific location in indexed memory as the response value when the program terminates. The purpose of this paper is to explore the applicability of this technique to tree-structured programs and to explore the intron effects that these studies bring to light. This paper's experimental results support the finding that this memory-based program response technique is an improvement for some, but not all, problems. In addition, this paper's experimental results support the finding that, contrary to past research and speculation, the addition or even facilitation of introns can seriously degrade the search performance of genetic programming.