An empirical study of multipopulation genetic programming

This paper presents an experimental study of distributed multipopulation genetic programming. Using three well-known benchmark problems and one real-life problem, we discuss the role of the parameters that characterize the evolutionary process of standard panmictic and parallel genetic programming. We find that distributing individuals between subpopulations offers in all cases studied here an advantage both in terms of the quality of solutions and of the computational effort spent, when compared to single populations. We also study the influence of communication patterns such as the communication topology, the number of individuals exchanged and the frequency of exchange on the evolutionary process. We empirically show that the topology does not have a marked influence on the results for the test cases studied here, while the frequency and number of individuals exchanged are related and there exists a suitable range for those parameters which is consistently similar for all the problems studied.