Free lunches for function and program induction

Riccardo Poli, Mario Graff, Nicholas Freitag McPhee

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper we prove that for a variety of practical problems and representations, there is a free lunch for search algorithms that specialise in the task of finding functions or programs that solve problems, such as genetic programming. In other words, not all such algorithms are equally good under all possible performance measures. We focus in particular on the case where the objective is to discover functions that fit sets of data-points - a task that we will call symbolic regression. We show under what conditions there is a free lunch for symbolic regression, highlighting that these are extremely restrictive.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 10th ACM SIGEVO Workshop on Foundations of Genetic Algorithms, FOGA'09
Pages183-194
Number of pages12
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Event10th ACM SIGEVO Workshop on Foundations of Genetic Algorithms, FOGA'09 - Orlando, FL, United States
Duration: Jan 9 2009Jan 11 2009

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 10th ACM SIGEVO Workshop on Foundations of Genetic Algorithms, FOGA'09

Conference

Conference10th ACM SIGEVO Workshop on Foundations of Genetic Algorithms, FOGA'09
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityOrlando, FL
Period1/9/091/11/09

Keywords

  • Genetic programming
  • No-free Lunch
  • Theory

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