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Differentiable Genetic Programming (2016) (arxiv.org)
31 points by henning on Dec 26, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | 7 comments on HN

In plain words: Genetic programming evolves programs by trial and error; here each program's output becomes a polynomial showing how it changes, so errors can be pushed backward to tune its constants. It recovered exact formulas and constant values on symbolic regression tasks and solved differential equations.

Abstract · Differentiable Genetic Programming

We introduce the use of high order automatic differentiation, implemented via the algebra of truncated Taylor polynomials, in genetic programming. Using the Cartesian Genetic Programming encoding we obtain a high-order Taylor representation of the program output that is then used to back-propagate errors during learning. The resulting machine learning framework is called differentiable Cartesian Genetic Programming (dCGP). In the context of symbolic regression, dCGP offers a new approach to the long unsolved problem of constant representation in GP expressions. On several problems of increasing complexity we find that dCGP is able to find the exact form of the symbolic expression as well as the constants values. We also demonstrate the use of dCGP to solve a large class of differential equations and to find prime integrals of dynamical systems, presenting, in both cases, results that confirm the efficacy of our approach.

Dario Izzo, Francesco Biscani, Alessio Mereta
arXiv:1611.04766 · cs.NE · submitted Nov 15, 2016
abstract · pdf · html

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I'm still facepalming GP because the associative and communative properties of algebra are omitted. Add in a nonlinear solver and you can reduce th problem size considerably.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.394....

So do you mean that GP could sped-up by taking the evolutionary process it's simulating and using a solver to find the process' fixed-points?
GP in general needs something like Tensorflow and a standard set of benchmarks
The fact that there is no standard set of benchmarks was recognised some years ago:

https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/papers/gecco12benchmarks3.pdf

http://www.cs.put.poznan.pl/wjaskowski/archives/wp-publicati...

While I think that the situation is improving, we are still far from a common set of benchmarks used by the entire GP community.

Well it needs something, it seems.

The article looks like an interesting approach but it gives every impression of being a "cul-da-sac", an effort that wasn't followed up on. Google scholar shows this article cited by four other articles - and those article not cited by anything more.

Some way of figuring out what articles matter in GP would be very useful.

gpbenchmarks.org ?
That's ok, there was a paper from Gecco2012, I think, GP needs better benchmarks.

Differential Equations and PDEs would be a good option too.