Straight Line Programs: A New Linear Genetic Programming Approach

Tree encodings of programs are well known for their representative power and are used very often in Genetic Programming. In this paper we experiment with a new data structure, named straight line program (slp), to represent computer programs. The main features of this structure are described and new recombination operators for GP related to slp´s are introduced. Experiments have been performed on symbolic regression problems. Results are encouraging and suggest that the GP approach based on slp´s consistently outperforms conventional GP based on tree structured representations.