Efficient exhaustive generation of functional programs using Monte-Carlo search with iterative deepening

Abstract

Genetic programming and inductive synthesis of functional programs are two major approaches to inductive functional programming. Recently, in addition to them, some researchers pursue efficient exhaustive program generation algorithms, partly for the purpose of providing a comparator and knowing how essential the ideas such as heuristics adopted by those major approaches are, partly expecting that approaches that exhaustively generate programs with the given type and pick up those which satisfy the given specification may do the task well. In exhaustive program generation, since the number of programs exponentially increases as the program size increases, the key to success is how to restrain the exponential bloat by suppressing semantically equivalent but syntactically different programs. In this paper we propose an algorithm applying random testing of program equivalences (or Monte-Carlo search for functional differences) to the search results of iterative deepening, by which we can totally remove redundancies caused by semantically equivalent programs. Our experimental results show that applying our algorithm to subexpressions during program generation remarkably reduces the computational costs when applied to rich primitive sets. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.