Abstract
Recent work in genetic programming (GP) has highlighted the need for stronger benchmark problems. For benchmarking planning scenarios, the artificial ant problem is often used. With a limited number of test cases, this problem is often fairly simple to solve. A more complex planning problem is Tartarus, but as of yet no standard representation for Tartarus exists for GP. This paper examines an existing parse tree representation for Tartarus, and identifies weaknesses in the way in which it manipulates environmental information. Through this analysis, an alternative representation is proposed for Tartarus that shares many similarities with those already used in GP for planning problems. Empirical analysis suggests that the proposed representation has qualities that make it a suitable benchmark problem.