Genetic Programming: Turing’s Third Way to Achieve Machine Intelligence

1. THE PROBLEM OF AUTOMATIC PROGRAMMING One of the central challenges of computer science is to get a computer to solve a problem without explicitly programming it. In particular, it would be desirable to have a problemindependent system whose input is a high-level statement of a problem’s requirements and whose output is a working computer program that solves the given problem. The challenge is to make computers do what needs to be done, without having to tell the computer exactly how to do it. Alan Turing recognized that machine intelligence may be realized using a biological approach. In his 1948 essay "Intelligent Machines" [9], Turing made the connection between search techniques and the challenge of getting a computer to solve a problem without explicitly programming it.