Michael Gospatrick wants help, specifically to further the research area of meta genetic programming. I found his web site – Ideas for Genetic Programming when I was browsing Technocrati’s Artificial Intelligence tagged articles.

I am all for genetic programming, but I am a little concerned that he is addressing his problem (find a cure for a disease) in the wrong order. Like many techniques, genetic programming seems really cool, but breaks down on general problems. For instance, evolutionary based algorithms – such as genetic programming – don’t do so well on problems that have very flat solution spaces. An example would be password discovery when breaking into a machine. There is no feedback on how close you are to the solution each time you enter a password – there is only one solution. If part of finding a cure to a disease is just the pure brute force of finding a combination of genes or proteins – then it is a flat solution space and genetic programming is not going to make any difference.

What Michael may want to do is write about the disease and try to explore the problems surrounding finding a cure.