Archive for the ‘genetic_algorithms’ Category

GP & Linux

Thursday, November 18th, 2004

I’ve been immersed in getting a Genetic Programming implementation up and running over the last few weeks. The combination of OCaml’s pattern matching and type inferencing have really come through for me, allowing me to comfortably experiment with alterations to the foundations of the system.

In the process, I’ve read quite a few research papers. CiteSeer has proven very helpful and Google just announced Google Scholar which looks promising.

Genetic Programming is extremely computationally expensive and as a result I’ve been doing quite a bit of CPU profiling lately. OCaml unfortunately doesn’t support profiling on Windows, so I’ve been spending some quality time with Linux. I’ve been surprised by how nice the latest distributions are, particularly the “sarge” release of Debian. In fact, for the first time, I now consider Linux a credible alternative to Windows on the desktop.

Posted in genetic_algorithms, ocaml | 4 Comments »

Book Notes

Tuesday, October 19th, 2004
Growing Up With Lucy: How To Build An Android in 20 Easy Steps arrived today and by page 3 there’s already an inspiring quote to share.
    “The Lucy project is really a kind of one-man, miniature moonshot – a broad and audacious endeavor with big prizes to be won, but also high personal stakes and a significant chance of complete failure. Yet moonshots are sometimes the only way: you cannot reach the moon by learning to jump incrementally higher and higher, no matter how impressively rapid your initial progress might be; sometimes you need to take a bold step, stop jumping, and set to work on building a moon rocket”

The author, Steve Grand, was the main programmer of Creatures and also wrote Creation: Life And How To Make It, one of my favorite ALife books.

Speaking of books, I’ve been pretty happy with AI Techniques for Game Programming for getting up to speed with Genetic Algorithms. The logical next step is Genetic Programming, a successor to Genetic Algorithms that evolves computer programs to find solutions to problems. I just ordered a copy of Genetic Programming : An Introduction, which looks promising and will hopefully keep my brain from exploding when I tackle the Koza books.

Posted in alife, genetic_algorithms | No Comments »