General Program Synthesis Benchmark Suite

Abstract

Recent interest in the development and use of non-trivial benchmark problems for genetic programming research has highlighted the scarcity of general program synthesis (also called "traditional programming") benchmark problems. We present a suite of 29 general program synthesis benchmark problems systematically selected from sources of introductory computer science programming problems. This suite is suitable for experiments with any program synthesis system driven by input/output examples. We present results from illustrative experiments using our reference implementation of the problems in the PushGP genetic programming system. The results show that the problems in the suite vary in difficulty and can be useful for assessing the capabilities of a program synthesis system.