Firstly, I am not a developer by trade or training -- it's mostly a former side-hobby that I'm trying to pick up again. I've embarked on a fairly ambitious development project (which, at my pace, will likely take years). But I'm willing to spend the time reading and learning. Recently I've become very interested in genetic programming / genetic algorithms for finding general solutions to problems. I don't know that vb.net is is the best choice (in fact, in my readings it seems that LISP was the standard for GP), but it seems at least as capable as C# and I am at least familiar with BASIC.

My question is how to approach the problem of generating function trees (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ge...ogram_Tree.png).

Initially I had considered encoding these trees as strings and then manipulating the strings, then writing a routine to parse the strings and evaluate the results. However, to me this seems entirely convoluted and round-about, not to mention very static with respect to how many nodes and child-nodes are generated. I stumbled across CodeDOM and wondered if it can be put to use somehow in this situation.

What do you guys think would be a good general approach to generating and then applying these function trees to datasets?