A competitive building block hypothesis

This paper is concerned with examining the way in which rooted building blocks grow in GP-like systems. We hypothesize that, in addition to the normal notion of co-operative building blocks, there are also competitive building blocks in the population. These competitive building blocks are all of the rooted variety, all share a similar root structure and compete with each other to spread their particular extensions to the common structure throughout the population. We demonstrate that not only do these competitive building blocks exist, but that they work in tandem with non-rooted co-operative building blocks.