Neutral Variations Cause Bloat in Linear GP

In this contribution we investigate the influence of different variation effects on the growth of code. A mutation-based variant of linear GP is applied that operates with minimum structural step sizes. Results show that neutral variations are a direct cause for (and not only a result of) the emergence and the growth of intron code. The influence of non-neutral variations has been found to be considerably smaller. Neutral variations turned out to be beneficial by solving two classification problems more successfully.

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