4 Application Domains

To further understand genetic programming, it is useful to consider the problem domains which were used to motivate the field and to develop a theoretical understanding of it. Such problem domains are also employed to test new representations and operators. These standard problems are used throughout the genetic programming literature and were introduced by Koza (1992) and later used by other researchers, e.g. [Daida et al., 2001,Luke, 2001,Luke and Spector, 1998,McPhee and Hopper, 1999,Soule and Heckendorn, 2002]. This section surveys these problems to introduce the domains which are used in this research.