1 An Analysis of Diversity

This thesis examines the issue of diversity in genetic programming. Genetic programming, an evolutionary methodology in the fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence, uses a population of solutions to guide search. As such, population diversity is an important issue. This thesis describes a series of carefully planned and designed experiments that provide a detailed understanding of genetic programming, diversity and diversity related issues. An introduction to genetic programming is presented next, followed by the contributions and an overview of this thesis.