Behavioral Program Synthesis: Insights and Prospects

Genetic programming (GP) is a stochastic, iterative generate-and-test approach to synthesizing programs from tests, i.e. examples of the desired input-output mapping. The number of passed tests, or the total error in continuous domains, is a natural objective measure of a program’s performance and a common yardstick when experimentally comparing algorithms. In GP, it is also by default used to guide the evolutionary search process. An assumption that an objective function should also be an efficient ‘search driver’ is common for all metaheuristics, such as the evolutionary algorithms which GP is a member of. Programs are complex combinatorial structures that exhibit even more complex input-output behavior, and in this chapter we discuss why this complexity cannot be effectively reflected by a single scalar objective. In consequence, GP algorithms are systemically ‘underinformed’ about the characteristics of programs they operate on, and pay for this with unsatisfactory performance and limited scalability. This chapter advocates behavioral program synthesis, where programs are characterized by informative execution traces that enable multifaceted evaluation and substantially change the roles of components in an evolutionary infrastructure. We provide a unified perspective on past work in this area, discuss the consequences of the behavioral viewpoint, outlining the future avenues for program synthesis and the wider application areas that lie beyond.