  Diversity represents an important aspect of genetic programming, being
directly correlated with search performance. When considered at the genotype
level, diversity often requires expensive tree distance measures which have a
negative impact on the algorithm's runtime performance. In this work we
introduce a fast, hash-based tree distance measure to massively speed-up the
calculation of population diversity during the algorithmic run. We combine this
measure with the standard GA and the NSGA-II genetic algorithms to steer the
search towards higher diversity. We validate the approach on a collection of
benchmark problems for symbolic regression where our method consistently
outperforms the standard GA as well as NSGA-II configurations with different
secondary objectives.
