The unique implications of brood selection for genetic programming

In nature it is common for organisms, as quoted from (Kozlowski and Steams, 1989), to “produce many offspring and then neglect, abort, resorb, or eat some of them, or allow them to eat each other.” This phenomenon is known variously as soft selection, brood selection, spontaneous abortion, and a host of other terms depending upon both semantics and the stage of ontogeny and/or development at which the culling of offspring takes place. The bottom line of this behavior in nature is the reduction of parental resource investment in offspring who are potentially less fit than others. The use of brood selection in genetic programming was first suggested in (Altenberg, 1993, 1994) as a method to select for representations of CTP with greater evolvability under recombination. We show that brood selection has benefits to artificial genetic systems analogous to those it confers upon biological genetic systems, specifically in terms of conservation of CPU investment and memory investment