Species system in GP

Dwiel · 2003-11-07T21:56:50

Hello, I have learning a lot about GP recently and am working on a implementation of it as I speak... I had an idea that I thought I would run by some people here. My idea is to seperate the population into many groups, say species. They would all be randomly generated at first, but then subclassified into species afterwards. By doing this, there would be a much greater chance for programs of similar structure would mix with each other. Along those line, each species would have a set of functions which could be accessed by all of the members of the species. each of these functions would have a chance to mutate each generation. These functions would not only be able to mutate and evolove, they would be allowed to have multipule, slightly varied copies of the same function in each species. There could be 3 functions called funct1, 3 called funct2 and 4 called funct3... then each generation, the functions which were used by programs with the highest fitness would be copied and mutated, replacing the worst. Now adding complexity to GP is not a good thing if you are only doing it to make it more complex. The idea behind the species, is to keep programms with similar structure together. As soon as I have a chance, I will test to see if my hypothosis that programs with more similar structure will result in a less common destructive mutation operator; programms that are more alike will tend to mix into programs that are useful. It makes no sence to try to mix 2 completely different species of animals, and expect a constructive mutation to result. Why should we expect two ''species'' of programs to mix and result in constructive mutation? The idea behind the functions common to the species, is that becaue these functions will be used by most of the species, only species with useful code in these functions will survive. There will be a large advantages to species that contain useful code in these functions. I also have some ideas about how to evolve species into entirely new species, but I havn''t thought it out to much yet so I should probobly wait. Basically, I am just wondering what you guys think about these ideas? Have they been done before? Have they sucseeded? Do you personally think they will work? What do you see that is wrong with my thinking? comments/questions... Thank you! Dwiel

Artificial Intelligence Programming

Started by Dwiel November 05, 2003 03:09 PM

10 comments, last by Dwiel 20 years, 5 months ago

Dwiel

365

Author

November 07, 2003 06:39 PM

quote:Original post by Optikal
quote:Original post by fup
It sounds to me that ''niching'' would just be a technique used to increase the selection intensity of your GA at the cost of exploration. This is not necessarily a bad thing, so long as you understand the consequences. It will cause your GA to converge quicker, but the risks of getting stuck in local optimums also increases. Without doing too much research in this area, I would be inclined to say that there are easier/less complex ways to increase the selection intensity without having to add the complexity of niching.

Speciation will not cause a population to converge quicker or increase the risk of it getting stuck in local minima/maxima. In fact it will do the complete opposite. That''s the whole point. Speciation helps to protect innovation in the genomes.

The reasoning behind my comment was that niching imposes restrictions on which individuals can reproduce with each other. It would seem to me, that removing these restrictions would increase the exploration of the GA (regardless of how well thought out those restrictions are). It will essentially provide an influence over which way the solutions evolve, whereas without these restrictions the way they evolve would be pretty random which would be more exploratory. Please explain further if I have misunderstood, I am interested in this stuff.

actually, now that you explain it that way... or now that I am awake enough to understand... what you are saying makes very much sence... It seems like having a single population will have a tendancy to find local minimum... due to the fact that they all end up being intermixed... it makes it hard for multipule places in the search space to develop. I am not sure what the effect of this would be, but it seems that maybe I should gather some data say, classifing programms into catagories that would have otherwise been a niche, and see if there is a correlation between closeness of structure, and improvement of the children.

Does this make any sence? If we have multipule populations, we have a smaller chance that the GP will find a relative min/max... If one solution ''gets stuck'', the others can continue improving... I do see your point though...

Good stuff...

Dwiel

Dwiel

fup

463

November 07, 2003 09:56 PM

When using speciation, a population of genomes is divided into species each generation. When a new innovation occurs (through mutation or recombination) that is far enough apart from any existing species a new species is created.

Typically, a species is killed when either its size decreases to zero or its fitness hasn’t increased within a user defined number of generations. This means the individuals that would normally have died out early in the evolution of a population remain active for much longer, protected amongst their species members. (Note, because of the protection afforded by using speciation you can experiment with much higher mutation rates than normal.)

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Species system in GP

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Species system in GP

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