The identification and exploitation of dormancy in genetic programming
In genetic programming, intronsfragments of code which do not contribute to the fitness of individualsare usually viewed negatively, and much research has been undertaken into ways of minimising their occurrence or effects. However, identification and removal of introns is often computationally expensive and sometimes intractable. We have therefore focused our attention on one particular class of intron, which we refer to as dormant nodes. Mechanisms for locating such nodes are cheap to implement, and reveal that the presence of dormancy can be extensive. Once identified, dormancy can be exploited in at least three ways: improving execution efficiency, improving solution-finding performance, and simplifying program code. Experimentation shows that the gains to be had in all three cases can be significant.
genetic programming introns efficiency performance simplification