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On relationships between semantic diversity, complexity and modularity of programming tasks

Published: 07 July 2012 Publication History

Abstract

We investigate semantic properties of linear programs, both internally, by analyzing the memory states they produce during execution, and externally, by inspecting program outcomes. The main concept of the formalism we propose is program trace, which reflects the behavior of program in semantic space. It allows us to characterize programming tasks in terms of traces of programs that solve them, and to propose certain measures that reveal their properties. We are primarily interested in measures that quantitatively characterize functional (semantic, behavioral) modularity of programming tasks. The experiments conducted on large samples of linear programs written in Push demonstrate that semantic structure varies from task to task, and reveal patterns of different forms of modularity. In particular, we identify interesting relationships between task modularity, task complexity, and program length, and conclude that a great share of programming tasks are modular.

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  • (2020)Learning feature spaces for regression with genetic programmingGenetic Programming and Evolvable Machines10.1007/s10710-020-09383-421:3(433-467)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2020
  • (2019)Semantic variation operators for multidimensional genetic programmingProceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference10.1145/3321707.3321776(1056-1064)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2019
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    GECCO '12: Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
    July 2012
    1396 pages
    ISBN:9781450311779
    DOI:10.1145/2330163
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 07 July 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. genetic programming
    2. modularity
    3. push
    4. semantics

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    GECCO '12
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    GECCO '12: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
    July 7 - 11, 2012
    Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

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    View all
    • (2020)Learning feature spaces for regression with genetic programmingGenetic Programming and Evolvable Machines10.1007/s10710-020-09383-421:3(433-467)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2020
    • (2019)Semantic variation operators for multidimensional genetic programmingProceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference10.1145/3321707.3321776(1056-1064)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2019
    • (2016)Behavioral Program Synthesis: Insights and ProspectsGenetic Programming Theory and Practice XIII10.1007/978-3-319-34223-8_10(169-183)Online publication date: 22-Dec-2016
    • (2015)Semantic Backpropagation for Designing Search Operators in Genetic ProgrammingIEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation10.1109/TEVC.2014.232125919:3(326-340)Online publication date: Jun-2015
    • (2014)Genetic programmingGenetic Programming and Evolvable Machines10.1007/s10710-013-9200-215:1(75-77)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2014
    • (2013)Pattern-guided genetic programmingProceedings of the 15th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation10.1145/2463372.2463496(949-956)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2013

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