A Puzzle to Challenge Genetic Programming

This report represents an initial investigation into the use of genetic programming to solve the N-prisoners puzzle. The puzzle has generated a certain level of interest among the mathematical community. We believe that this puzzle presents a significant challenge to the field of evolutionary computation and to genetic programming in particular. The overall aim is to generate a solution that encodes complex decision making. Our initial results demonstrate that genetic programming can evolve good solutions. We compare these results to engineered solutions and discuss some of the implications. One of the consequences of this study is that it has highlighted a number of research issues and directions and challenges for the evolutionary computation community. We conclude the article by presenting some of these directions which range over several areas of evolutionary computation, including multi-objective fitness, coevolution and cooperation, and problem representations.