genetic programming

In artificial intelligence, genetic programming (GP) is an evolutionary algorithm-based methodology inspired by biological evolution to find computer programs that perform a user-defined task. Essentially GP is a set of instructions and a fitness function to measure how well a computer has performed a task. It is a specialization of genetic algorithms (GA) where each individual is a computer program. It is a machine learning technique used to optimize a population of computer programs according to a fitness landscape determined by a program's ability to perform a given computational task.

Is this really a real thing? how do you even generate and mutate programs?

>>18
Might be tough.... Even some bacteria have sex^[1]. Anyway, you'd have to go back about 1.2 billion years to stop it completely. Then you'd probably have to jump forward by several billion, because things move very slowly when you're working only on mutations. Sexual reproduction would appear to be Quite Important, because it's even things that can reproduce asexually, like plants, seem to prefer it. It could be like flight or swimming, where it evolved independently multiple times, in which case you have little chance of stopping it.

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^[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_conjugation}