Genetic Programming: What is a chromosome?

In Genetic Programming, we use chromosomes to describe our inputs and/or outputs. Best way to explain this is to give an example. Let's say we have two inputs X and Y.

X = 5
Y = 10

We would want this these values in binary, so lets convert.

X = 101
Y = 1010

Now to build our chromosome, we simply append one string to the other

chromosome = 1011010

There you have a chromosome. Why would we want to this instead of just passing the integers as part of an array? the answer lies in crossovers and mutations. I'll cover those in a later post.