3 Parity Related Studies

The Parity problem has also been investigated in detail in [Langdon and Poli, 2002]. The most characteristic aspects of this problem are the few test cases that define fitness and the requirement that all terminals are processed by a solution to achieve the ideal fitness. Additionally, because of the nature of the problem, a random guess on all fitness test cases will lead to a score of 50%. O'Reilly and Oppacher (1994,1995) performed a comparison of several hill-climbing methods using similar genetic programming operators to show that hill-climbing generally performed better than genetic programming on the 6 and 11 Multiplexer problem. Similar results were also obtained in [Juels and Wattenberg, 1995]. While the two problems, Multiplexer and Parity, are not identical, they share several similar features (e.g. boolean functions and terminals and very few fitness function values).