Self modifying Cartesian Genetic Programming: Parity

Self modifying CGP (SMCGP) is a developmental form of Cartesian genetic programming(CGP). It differs from CGP by including primitive functions which modify the program. Beginning with the evolved genotype the self-modifying functions produce a new program (phenotype) at each iteration. In this paper we have applied it to a well known digital circuit building problem: even-parity. We show that it is easier to solve difficult parity problems with SMCGP than either with CGP or modular CGP, and that the increase in efficiency grows with problem size. More importantly, we prove that SMCGP can evolve general solutions to arbitrary-sized even parity problems.