Technology journalists aren't supposed to own stock in the companies they cover. The yuks server Laff.net has crafted, copied and stolen 50,000 jokes. Soon it will unleash them on you. The beauty of genetic programming is that the programmer doesn't need to be an expert in satellite design, physiology or molecular biology to do this. Early work in GP focused on designing circuits similar to those found in stereos.
Automatic programming is something of a holy grail in computer science.
Koza, who holds the patent on the process of genetic programming and is the president of Genetic Programming Inc., has high standards for what he considers a successful system of automatic programming. The most important, he says, is that it produce results that stand on their own. Instead, he says, he wants to use GP to tackle the sort of problems that challenge the best human minds. In fact, he is not being unrealistic. In 1996, Koza used genetic programming to evolve a design for a specific type of electrical circuit.