gray matter
Last night’s session with Ollie Glass in developing a genetic algorithm for spiders’ webs led to discussion of Gray code in place of binary numbers to represent characteristics of the webs. I’d never come across the concept before, but I can see the benefits for genetic algorithms. Two successive numbers only ever differ by one bit, so an arbitrary mutation of one bit won’t lead to a massive change in value. (The rest of the discussion on Wikipedia left me cold though.)
There won’t be a session next Monday, but I’ve got a lot of work to do to follow up the material we covered last night. This is where the algorithm starts…
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I would love to see the results of your web-building experiments.
I found this related work: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.17.5279
“Analysing Spider Web-building Behaviour with Rule-based Simulations and Genetic Algorithms (1997)”
Hi David. Thanks for that link. I’ve had a quick glance at the paper, and it looks fascinating, though probably way above my level. I’m just a beginner, and concentrating mainly on learning to use genetic algorithms as a technique rather than trying to simulate webs accurately, so there will, at least in the short term, be some very crude approximations.
I also had a look at your poster on using genetic algorithms to create puzzles. Very interesting. You’ve had to cram a lot of information into a small space, so it would be fascinating to read about this work in more detail. Is it available online anywhere?
Here is the full paper about creating puzzles using genetic algorithms:
http://oranchak.com/evostar-paper.pdf
I also tried to crack the Zodiac Killer cipher:
http://oranchak.com/?p=440
And did some crude experiments using genetic algorithms to create artwork:
http://oranchak.com/photosome/results/
As you can see, I kind of fell in love with genetic algorithms. They have been a lot of fun to play with!
Good luck with your explorations!