Java based Distributed Genetic Programming on the Internet Technical Report CSRP-99-7

We proposed a distributed approach for parallelising Genetic Programming on the Internet. The approach harnesses the wealth of computing resources available on the Internet to provide the computing power required by Genetic Programming to solve hard problems. A distributed genetic programming system termed DGP is developed in the Java programming language to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach. Features of the DGP system include the use of Java Servlets to handle communication between distributed machines and the use of a population pool to facilitate migrations. In addition, the DGP system has an interactive user interface for controlling the run and graphical displays of the evolution process. The DGP system has been implemented live over the Internet and the results prove that the approach is feasible. An experiment was conducted to determine the performance of the DGP system and results showed that the DGP system has a much higher probability of finding solutions than the distributed approaches taken in our previous work and the conventional single population Genetic Programming approach.