Well GP is not random search, but still, the space is too huge for it to find anything of significance yet. I remember reading a paper that trained GP to write

Well GP is not random search, but still, the space is too huge for it to find anything of significance yet. I remember reading a paper that trained GP to write a sorting program, that is around the most complex problem we can solve with it now. In my opinion, what makes natural selection work but not GP, is that the life time of Earth and the number of individuals existed vastly exceeds the typical parameters of a GP simulation. Biological programs are also less likely to be killed off by a mutation compared to GP programs, so in some ways, the gradient is a lot smoother.