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C. FERREIRA In N. Nedjah, L. de M. Mourelle, A. Abraham, eds., Genetic Systems Programming: Theory and Experiences, Studies in Computational Intelligence, Vol. 13, pp. 21-56, Springer-Verlag, 2006.

Automatically Defined Functions in Gene Expression Programming

Open Reading Frames and Genes
 
The structural organization of GEP genes is better understood in terms of open reading frames (ORFs). In biology, an ORF or coding sequence of a gene begins with the start codon, continues with the amino acid codons, and ends at a termination codon. However, a gene is more than the respective ORF, with sequences upstream of the start codon and sequences downstream of the stop codon. Although in GEP the start site is always the first position of a gene, the termination point does not always coincide with the last position of a gene. Consequently, it is common for GEP genes to have noncoding regions downstream of the termination point. (For now we will not consider these noncoding regions, as they do not interfere with expression.)

Consider, for example, the algebraic expression:

(1)

It can also be represented as a diagram or ET:

where “Q” represents the square root function.

This kind of diagram representation is in fact the phenotype of GEP chromosomes. And the genotype can be easily inferred from the phenotype as follows:

01234567  

/Q-+cdab

(2)

which is the straightforward reading of the ET from left to right and from top to bottom (exactly as one reads a page of text). The expression (2) is an open reading frame, starting at “/” (position 0) and terminating at “b” (position 7). These ORFs were named K-expressions from Karva language.

Consider another ORF, the following K-expression:

0123456789  

*//aQ*bddc

(3)

Its expression as an ET is also very simple and straightforward. In order to express the ORF correctly, we must follow the rules governing the spatial distribution of functions and terminals. First, the start of a gene corresponds to the root of the expression tree, and it occupies the topmost position (or first line) on the tree. Second, in the next line, below each function, are placed as many branch nodes as there are arguments to that function. Third, from left to right, the nodes are filled consecutively with the next elements of the K-expression. Fourth, the process is repeated until a line containing only terminals is formed. In this case, the following expression tree is formed:

Looking at the structure of ORFs only, it is difficult or even impossible to see the advantages of such a representation, except perhaps for its simplicity and elegance. However, when open reading frames are analyzed in the context of a gene, the advantages of this representation become obvious. As I said before, GEP chromosomes have fixed length, and they are composed of one or more genes of equal length. Consequently, the length of a gene is also fixed. Thus, in GEP, what changes is not the length of genes, but rather the length of the ORF. Indeed, the length of an ORF may be equal to or less than the length of the gene. In the first case, the termination point coincides with the end of the gene, and in the latter, the termination point is somewhere upstream of the end of the gene. And this obviously means that GEP genes have, most of the time, noncoding regions at their ends.

And what is the function of these noncoding regions at the end of GEP genes? We will see that they are the essence of Gene Expression Programming and evolvability, because they allow the modification of the genome using all kinds of genetic operators without any kind of restriction, always producing syntactically correct programs. Thus, in GEP, the fundamental property of genotype/phenotype systems – syntactic closure – is intrinsic, allowing the totally unconstrained restructuring of the genotype and, consequently, an efficient evolution.

In the next section we are going to analyze the structural organization of GEP genes in order to understand how they invariably code for syntactically correct programs and why they allow the unconstrained application of virtually any genetic operator.

 

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