Saving effort in parallel GP by means of plagues

Abstract

Recently, a new technique that allows Genetic Programming to save computing resources has been proposed. This technique was presented as a new operator acting on the population, and was called plague. By removing some individuals every generation, plague aims at compensating for the increase in size of individuals, thus saving computing time when looking for solutions. By means of some test problems, we show that the technique is also useful when employing a parallel version of GP, such as that based on the island model. © Springer-Verlag 2004.