On the Trade-Off between Population Size and Number of Generations in GP for Program Synthesis

When using genetic programming for program synthesis, we are usually constrained by a computational budget measured in program executions during evolution. The computational budget is influenced by the choice of population size and number of generations per run leading to a trade-off between both possibilities. To better understand this trade-off, we analyze the effects of different combinations of population sizes and number of generations on performance. Further, we analyze how the use of different variation operators affects this trade-off. We conduct experiments on a range of common program synthesis benchmarks and find that using larger population sizes lead to a better search performance. Additionally, we find that using high probabilities for crossover and mutation lead to higher success rates. Focusing on only crossover or using only mutation usually leads to lower search performance. In summary, we find that large populations combined with high mutation and crossover rates yield highest GP performance for program synthesis approaches.