Comparing Finite State Automata Representation with GP-trees

Genetic Programming and Evolutionary Programming are fields studying the application of artificial evolution on evolving directly executable programs, in form of trees similar to Lisp expressions (GP-trees), or Finite State Automata (FSA). In this exercise, we study the performance of these methods on several example problems, and draw conclusions on the suitability of the representations with respect to the task structure and properties. We investigate the role of incremental evolution in the context of FSA representation. We also present an evolutionary software package for educational programming environment Imagine, which can be used for introducing the principles of evolutionary computing to wider young audience.