[tariqk]

That's a pretty interesting look into what happens in an evolutionary algorithm.

But for a minute there I was hoping that the OP was going to evolve an actual "hello world" program. That might be an interesting exercise to do over a Lisp-like language.

[tomjen3]

Somebody actually did that, in Lisp, to be able to write a hello world program in a completely fucked out language.

The problem with just generating a hello world program is that there is no guarantee that you wont end up with a bunch of endless loops.

[rmc]

A lot of programmes have a regular grammer & parsers for their language. You can then use parsers and the like to turn a tree into a source code (and vice versa) and evolve programmes.

[user24]

yeah I think genetic programming is often done with Lisp.

[dmoney]

I don't see a reason to write the genetic algorithm in Lisp, but for the code that's being evolved it seems like the logical choice due to its minimal syntax. I'm working on a PHP program for evolving programs, and the evolved programs are in a lisp-like dialect made for just that purpose.

[user24]

IIRC it's something to do with the fact that lisp can easily be represented as a tree and so crossover is very simple; just swap branches. I don't know lisp so I'm just regurgitating info I picked up at university.

[kruhft]

One problem with using that technique is that it's has been patented, along with derivatives of it, for quite a while.