Ceci n'est pas une pipe -- Toward a Symbolic Solver for the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus Using Evolutionary Computation

The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is a benchmark designed to assess the capability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to generalize starting from a few samples, a task humans excel at. The ARC-AGI contests held since 2020 have been the focus of intense competition, with participants proposing approaches ranging from traditional symbolic AI to Transformer architectures. Despite a long history of successes, evolutionary algorithms (EAs) were notably absent from the approaches appearing in the main contest. As score-and-search program synthesis approaches, EAs suffer from issues related to choosing the proper representation in the Domain-Specific Language applied to the problem (for example, pixel-level or object-level), and distinguishing between two candidate solutions producing the same outputs. In this work, we present the first fully symbolic, evolutionary-based program synthesis approach submitted to the ARC-AGI-2 main contest. The main contributions are: evolving the grid parser and the output projector together with the program that transforms the grid, so that a task-specific language emerges during program synthesis; grounding the symbols the parser can extract in core knowledge theory from cognitive psychology; and an object-aware fitness that grades partially correct outputs beyond pixel-level discrepancies.