Cartesian Genetic Programming: Why No Bloat?

For many years now it has been known that Cartesian Genetic Programming CGP does not exhibit program bloat. Two possible explanations have been proposed in the literature: neutral genetic drift and length bias. This paper empirically disproves both of these and thus, reopens the question as to why CGP does not suffer from bloat. It has also been shown for CGP that using a very large number of nodes considerably increases the effectiveness of the search. This paper also proposes a new explanation as to why this may be the case.

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