Straight line programs: a new linear genetic programming approach

Abstract

Tree encodings of programs are well known for their representative power and are used very often in genetic programming In this paper we experiment with a new data structure, named straight line program (slp), to represent computer programs. The main features of this structure are described and new recombination operators for GP related to slp’s are introduced. Experiments have been performed on symbolic regression problems. Results are encouraging and suggest that the GP approach based on slp’s consistently outperforms conventional GP based on tree structured representations