(email to my fellow researchers)

This morning I completed the final evolutionary process for my GP code. It now supports Reproduction (no mutation), Point Mutation, Branch Mutation, and Crossover Reproduction.

I have run thousands of trees through the system without a glitch. In my new “debug” mode I am able to visually monitor the expansion and pruning of GP trees to make certain they are evolving as required.

I have learned the Sympy library which takes my full strings and reworks them to functional, more compact functions is not terribly forgiving. Yes, it will take a few dozen elements in a long polynomial and reduce the complexity (removing two instances of a variable which cancel each other, or rewording multiple instances as 2x, 3x, etc.), but if there is an error it simply stops execution.

This works to my favour, as I am able to trust the expressions are solid and fully functional in each generation.

I am a bit OCD so I will surely spend time making certain the internal documentation is clean and well stated. This will become the foundation for my User Guide and appendix in my Thesis.

The next major step is to run a few benchmark problems through my code to make certain I am seeing the desired output. Then, move into working again with the KAT7 data.

I am excited to get back to literature review, my thesis, and not programming every day :)

Thanks for all the support this past 3 months!

kai