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The InitialDuplicatesRetries property works differently for genetic algorithms and genetic programming. In genetic algorithms, this property is the maximum number of times to retry generation before giving up for the entire initial population. For genetic programming, this property specifies how many times we attempt to create a unique individual per individual. If all of these retry attempts fail, the initialization depth is incremented to try and make a unique individual at the new depth.

With genetic algorithms, this property is not very important as generating unique individuals is easy and duplicates will not occur very often. However, for genetic programming, initialization duplicates will almost certainly occur. Having duplicate individuals in the initial population is a waste of processing power as it limits the pool of truly available individuals (though having duplicates in later generations is a feature not a bug as fitter individuals will tend to be selected and reproduces more as we evolve our solution). It is highly recommended to avoid duplicates in the initialization phase.