What this book is all about

This book is an compendium to a workshop exploring genetic programming. Genetic programming is

a technique whereby computer programs are encoded as a set of genes that are then modified (evolved) using an evolutionary algorithm.

This book will explain various ideas and will ground them by discussing ways you could implement them. It will provide you with a practical introduction to genetic programming and hones it with exercises, both pen and paper as implementation exercises.

Each chapter will introduce ideas needed to create your own, or work with a, genetic programming environment, that can solve a certain problem. The ideas will be illustrated by the following projects.

1. Nadezhda was the name of a cockroach sent into space to study its behavior. Even though cockroaches have far more intricate behavior than we attribute them during this problem, we like to stay in the space theme. You can inspect the code in the nadezhda directory. This project is used as an illustration to explore the concepts of genetic programming. It is very much a toy problem, but it can illustrate the important concepts.
2. AGC is an abbreviation for Apollo’s Guidance Computer that was responsible for aiding in computations of guidance, navigation and control of the space craft. If you want, you could implement this yourself, if you follow the project in this book. This project is a bit more involved than Nadezhda, and allows you to take a genetic programming framework for a spin. You can use your new found skills from the ground up to really test your understanding.
3. Lunar Lander tries to land safely on the surface of the moon. The catch is that you are giving control to a program that a computer wrote. This project demonstrates that hard problems can be solved by genetic programming. You can inspect the result in moonlander-ast-rust. This project is included to focus on the interesting aspects of genetic programming. I.e. how to find a good fitness function for my problem.