[Search] Fix disjoint sets of properties

[Tritlo]

One issue is that we're trying to fix all the properties at once, which might be too much. One idea is to find disjoint sets of properties: i.e. if two properties do not mention any of the same identifiers, they are considered disjoint. Then we could fix one set of disjoint properties to generate a fix for those properties and then (hopefully) merge those fixes.

[Tritlo]

Finding fixes for these disjoint sets could also be done by a different type of search, maybe exhaustive or random. Then we could merge those solutions together with genetic search.

[lapplislazuli]

shouldn't be this inherently in the fitness function?

Or do you mean that the user declares two sets of properties and the search tries to do a multi-objective optimization?

[Tritlo]

No, we can infer the disjoint sets ourselves, so the user doesn't do anything. But the search itself would be doing a multi-objective search which is (hopefully) an easier problem to solve.

[lapplislazuli]

I think its worth exploring, but that is actually another research question 😄

I see the next paper coming: "Grouped Spectra Fault Localization - The future of Program Repair".

Shall we mark it as Backlog for now?