Gene Duplication to Enable Genetic Programming to Concurrently Evolve Both the Architecture and Work-Performing Steps of a Computer Program

Susumu Ohno's provocative book Evolution by Gene Duplication proposed that the creation of new proteins in nature (and hence new structures and new behaviors in living things) begins with a gene duplication and that gene duplication is "the major force of evolution." This paper describes six new architecture-altering operations for genetic programming that are patterned after the naturally-occurring chromosomal operations of gene duplication and gene deletion. When these new operations are included in a run of genetic programming, genetic programming can dynamically change, during the run, the architecture of a multi-part program consisting of a main program and a set of hierarchically-called subprograms. These on-the-fly architectural changes occur while genetic programming is concurrently evolving the work-performing steps of the main program and the hierarchically-called subprograms. The new operations can be interpreted as an automated way to change the representation of a problem while solving the problem. Equivalently, these operations can be viewed as an automated way to decompose a problem into an non-pre-specified number of subproblems of non-pre-specified dimensionality; solve the subproblems; and assemble the solutions of the subproblems into a solution of the overall problem. These operations can also be interpreted as providing an automated way to specialize and generalize.