A Comparative Study of Automatic Programming Techniques

Automatic programming, an evolutionary computing technique, forms the programs automatically and is based on higher level features that can be easily specified than normal programming languages. Genetic Programming (GP) is the first and best-known automatic programming technique that is applied to solve many practical problems.  Artificial Bee Colony Programming (ABCP) is one of the latest proposed automatic programming method that combines evolutionary approach with swarm intelligence. GP is an extension version of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and ABCP is based on Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. The main differences of these automatic programing techniques and their conventional algorithms (GA and ABC) are modeling solution. In ABC same as GA, the solutions are represented fixed code blocks. In GP and ABCP, the positions of food sources are expressed in tree structure that is composed of different combinations of terminals and functions that are specifically defined as problems. This paper presents a review on GP and ABCP and they are worked in symbolic regression, prediction and feature selection problems which are widely tackled by researchers. The results of the ABCP compared with results of GP show that this algorithm is a powerful optimization technique for structural design.