begin  quoting Tracy R Reed as of Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 03:37:13PM +0700:
> Stewart Stremler wrote:
> > I've been messing about with GAs too much lately.  Lots of local
> > minima blocking the preferred solution because to get there from
> > here a little 'slop' is needed now an again.
> 
> Now THIS is something worthy of kplug-list and I would like to hear more
> about it. I have been intrigued by GA's ever since I read Steven Levy's
> book "Artificial Intelligence" back in 93 or so.

"Artificial Intelligence" or "Artificial Life"? 

(No, I haven't checked...)

>                                                  At one point I was
> really wanted to use GA to write an optimal Core Wars program and win
> the King Of The Hill competition. But since the Core Wars machine did
> not actually have a real bytecode I could never really figure out a good
> way to implement a GA using the text based assembler language of Core
> Wars with my minimal knowledge.

GAs are generally dial-twiddlers; GPs (as I understand it) are program-builders.
Which one were you thinking of?

>                                 Also any calculation I did showed that I
> did not have nearly enough computing power at the time to do anything
> useful.
 
You'd've wanted to build your beasty outside of the environment, not
train' 'em up inside the environment.  Core Wars had the constraint that
cloned processes share their time-slice, so a program that tried various
versions _in_ the game would run really slow.

> Can you tell us what you are using GA's for and how it works? Any good
> references on the subject?

Non-linear scheduling with arbitrary constraints.  And I'm mostly a 
sounding board, although I rewrote the GA into a framework because the
previous codebase was a mass of spaghetti code, and changing something
took a week, so there was no way to quickly see "if I tweak X, would
that help?".  (It's not suprising that just about everyone builds a
new one or copies-and-modifies another GA, because the pressures on
making "just a little change" are high.  Plus, it's mostly Ph.Ds who
are working on such things, and as a general rule, the amazing thing
about Ph.D code is that it works at all.)

A co-worker has a pretty good book on the subject, when he gets back
into town I'll see if I can get a title/author for you.

And isn't this a subject for LPSG? :)

-Stewart "I should take an older version of the code and relese it." Stremler

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