Genetic Programming

• You can also use this mechanism to learn programs.
• Typically you represent a program with a functional language like lisp. (It's a tree.)
• You breed the programs by replacing branches.
• Typically you penalise bloat (big programs) in the evaluation function.
• The evaluation function is typically based on a program you're searching for.
• As far as I'm aware, it's not very well used industrially.
• I'm not worried about being replaced soon.