Two New Mutation Techniques for Cartesian Genetic Programming

Cartesian Genetic Programming is often used with a point mutation as the sole genetic operator. In this paper, we propose two phenotypic mutation techniques and take a step towards advanced phenotypic mutations in Cartesian Genetic Programming The functionality of the proposed mutations is inspired by biological evolution which mutates DNA sequences by inserting and deleting nucleotides. Experiments with boolean functions problem show a better search performance when the proposed mutations are used. The results of our experiments indicate that the proposed mutations are beneficial for the use of Cartesian Genetic Programming.