Does Genetic Programming Work Well on Automated Program Repair?

Automated program repair has made some important progress in the recent decade. One well-known repair tool is GneProg, which automates the patch generation process according to the guidance of genetic programming. Although GenProg has successfully fixed many legacy faulty programs, the guidance effectiveness of genetic programming used by GenProg has not been even justified through the comparison with random search algorithm. In this paper we try to make the guidance effectiveness comparison between genetic programming and random search algorithm on program repair. The experimental results show that genetic programming does not perform better than random search algorithm on guiding the patch generation process.