Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons^™

General Program Synthesis From Examples Using Genetic Programming With Parent Selection Based On Random Lexicographic Orderings Of Test Cases, Thomas Helmuth

Doctoral Dissertations

Software developers routinely create tests before writing code, to ensure that their programs fulfill their requirements. Instead of having human programmers write the code to meet these tests, automatic program synthesis systems can create programs to meet specifications without human intervention, only requiring examples of desired behavior. In the long-term, we envision using genetic programming to synthesize large pieces of software. This dissertation takes steps toward this goal by investigating the ability of genetic programming to solve introductory computer science programming problems. We present a suite of 29 benchmark problems intended to test general program synthesis systems, which we systematically …