Information theoretic analysis of large evolved programs produced by running genetic programming for up to a million generations has shown even functions as smooth and well behaved as floating point addition and multiplication loose entropy and consequently are robust and fail to propagate disruption to their outputs. This means, while dependent upon fitness tests, many genetic changes deep within trees are silent. For evolution to proceed at reasonable rate it must be possible to measure the impact of most code changes, yet in large trees most crossover sites are distant from the root node. We suggest to evolve very large very complex programs, it will be necessary to adopt an open architecture where most mutation sites are within 10 to 100 levels of the organism's environment.

Following Prof. Mark Harman of Facebook's keynote and formal presentations (which are recorded in the proceedings) there was a wide ranging discussion at the eighth international Genetic Improvement workshop, GI-2020 @ ICSE (held as part of the 42nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering on Friday 3rd July 2020). Topics included industry take up, human factors, explainabiloity (explainability, justifyability, exploitability) and GI benchmarks. We also contrast various recent online approaches (e.g. SBST 2020) to holding virtual computer science conferences and workshops via the WWW on the Internet without face-2-face interaction. Finally we speculate on how the Coronavirus Covid-19 Pandemic will affect research next year and into the future.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Humanity no longer needs God but may with the help of artificial intelligence develop a new form of collective consciousness that fulfils the role of religion, U.S. author Dan Brown said on Thursday. Brown made the provocative remark at the Frankfurt Book Fair where he was promoting his new novel, "Origin", the fifth outing for Harvard "symbology" professor Robert Langdon, the protagonist of "The Da Vinci Code", a book that questioned the history of Christianity. "Origin" was inspired by the question "Will God survive science?", said Brown, adding that this had never happened in the history of humanity. "Are we naive today to believe that the gods of the present will survive and be here in a hundred years?" Brown, 53, told a packed news conference.

Humanity no longer needs God but may with the help of artificial intelligence develop a new form of collective consciousness that fulfills the role of religion, author Dan Brown has said. Brown made the provocative remark on Thursday at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany where he was promoting his new novel, 'Origin', the fifth outing for Harvard'symbology' professor Robert Langdon. Landon was also the protagonist of Brown's novel'The Da Vinci Code', a book that questioned the history of Christianity. 'Origin' was inspired by the question'Will God survive science?', said Brown, adding that this had never happened in the history of humanity. 'Are we naive today to believe that the gods of the present will survive and be here in a hundred years?' Brown, 53, told a packed news conference.

We study a generic program to investigate the scope for automatically customising it for a vital current task, which was not considered when it was first written. In detail, we show genetic programming (GP) can evolve models of aspects of BLAST's output when it is used to map Solexa Next-Gen DNA sequences to the human genome.