Benefits of distributed solutions when evolving symbolic equations

It has been previously shown that evolving modular programs can improve the efficiency of induction for a specific class of modular programs called automatically defined functions (ADFs). ADFs, a variant of genetic programming, induce hierarchically decomposed programs similar to those a human programmer might construct. This paper demonstrates that multiple interacting programs (MIPs), an evolutionary program that induces systems of equations, also provides an efficiency increase when multiple equations are evolved rather than a single equation. This result is demonstrated on two different Boolean problems using both a numerical and Boolean representation.