Stack-based Genetic Programming is slow

Before LLMs became really good at generating code, Genetic Programming was considered the most promising approach for general-purpose program synthesis. Genetic Algorithms For those who are not aware, Genetic Algorithms are a family of evolutionary algorithms that use a linear representation, typically an array of integers, encoding a solution. My hello world is the knapsack problem, when you are trying to find the combination of items that maximizes the value of the combination while keeping the total weight of the selected objects. In Genetic Programming, you can represent each combination as an array ([True, False, ..., False]). The algorithm creates a population of combinations and assesses their quality (e.g., -weight if it's overweight and value if not). Genetic Algorithms create a new generation of the population by selecting individuals with a probability proportional to their fitness (quality). First, two parents are selected, and (with a random crossover point), the first…