 Are there any very long term genetic programming experiments?
JimmyL: Why? We do long-term experiments in biology because genetic evolution is slow - whereas with genetic programming we can speed it up limited only by the computing technology.Let's say biological evolution has been going for 4.5 Billion years, at an average of one mutation per second for all that time. A quick search says that a modern Core 2 Extreme can process about 50,000 MIPS. Let's say that each mutation takes 100 instructions on average (including set-up and tear-down, etc.), and that we have 5,000 MIPS available for this calculation process - then it would be possible to do all that calculation in about 9 seconds of CPU time.Bottom line - even if my back-of-the-envelope calculation about is two or three orders of magnitude off - is that you don't need you run a long-term experiment to give genetic algorithms the same amount of run-time as nature had with us, you just need a few bucks of AWS credit.