alt Hacker NewsA program is composed of arbitrarily many instructions of your set. How are you accounting for this; trying every possible program length? And you are considering the simpler case where the search space is discrete, unlike the continuous spaces in most machine learning problems.
I think you need to think this through some more. You may see there is a reason nobody uses genetic algorithms for real world tasks.
> How are you accounting for this; trying every possible program length?
Part of the mutation function involves probabilistically growing and shrinking the program size (i.e., inserting and removing random instructions).
> And you are considering the simpler case where the search space is discrete, unlike the continuous spaces in most machine learning problems.
All "continuous spaces" that embody modern machine learning techniques are ultimately discrete.