Imitating success: a memetic crossover operator for genetic programming

For some problem domains, the evaluation of individuals is significantly more expensive than the other steps in the evolutionary process. Minimizing these evaluations is vital if we want to make genetic programming a viable strategy. In order to minimize the required evaluations, we need to maximize the amount learned from each evaluation. To accomplish this, we introduce a new crossover operator for genetic programming, memetic crossover that allows individuals to imitate the observed success of others. An individual that has done poorly in some parts of the problem may then imitate an individual that did well on those same parts. This results in an intelligent search of the feature-space, and therefore fewer evaluations.