The work is devoted to the comparison of two methods of symbolic regression, a method of genetic programming and a variational method of genetic programming. The comparison is made on the basis of the computing experiment, which solved a problem of control system synthesis for a model of nonlinear control object, describing the interaction of the two systems of "predator" and "victim". For the purity of the experiment the genetic algorithms parameters in the both methods were Identical. For variational genetic programming there was selected a trivial basic solution in the form of the sum of input variable products for custom settings. This basic solution is always chosen in the case of the absence of meaningful task analysis. The comparison of methods for the speed of solving the problem and for the quality of the achieved control is made. © 2017 The Authors.