Page 156 - 49A Field Guide to Genetic Programming

142 14 Conclusions

Today, decades later, we can see that indeed Turing was right. GP has
started fulfilling his dream by providing us with a systematic method, based
on Darwinian evolution, for getting computers to automatically solve hard
real-life problems. To do so, it simply requires a high-level statement of
what needs to be done and enough computing power.
Turing also understood the need to evaluate objectively the behaviour ex-
hibited by machines, to avoid human biases when assessing their intelligence.
This led him to propose an imitation game, now known as the Turing test for
machine intelligence, whose goals are wonderfully summarised by Samuel’s
position statement quoted in the introduction of this book (page 1). The
eight criteria for human competitiveness we discussed in Section 12.3 are
essentially motivated by the same goals.
At present GP is unable to produce computer programs that would pass
the full Turing test for machine intelligence, and it might not be ready
for this immense task for centuries. Nonetheless, thanks to the constant
improvements in GP technology, in its theoretical foundations and in com-
puting power, GP has been able to solve dozens of difficult problems with
human-competitive results and to provide valuable solutions to many other
problems (see Chapter 12). These are a small step towards fulfilling Turing
and Samuel’s dreams, but they are also early signs of things to come. It is
reasonable to predict that in a few years time GP will be able to routinely
and competently solve important problems for us, in a variety of application
domains with human-competitive performance. Genetic programming will
then become an essential collaborator for many human activities. This will
be a remarkable step forward towards achieving true human-competitive
machine intelligence.
This field guide is an attempt to chart the terrain of techniques and
applications we have encountered in our journey in the world of genetic
programming. Much is still unmapped and undiscovered. We hope this
book will make it easier for other travellers to start many long and profitable
journeys in this exciting world.

If you have found this book to be useful, please feel free to redistribute it
(see page ii). Should you want to cite this book, please refer to the entry for
(Poli et al., 2008) in the bibliography.