🚀 go-pugleaf

pauld@cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis) says:

> One really interesting feature that I have observed from my own work
> with a tierra-like system is the effect of a reproductive burden on
> the speed of evolution. ...

> So, in normal GA-land, you simply use the "hand of god"
> approach: you reach in, and *you* do the reproduction, eliminating any
> selection pressure on this feature. ...

> But wait ! Perhaps, just perhaps, this reproductive feature is just
> what you want. Its not very difficult to make a tierra-like system
> evolve its own form of crossover. All kinds of other wierd and
> wonderful reproductive mechanisms evolve too. It seems possible to me
> that when evolution is viewed as explorations of a vast state space,
> particular reproductive methods might be incapable of ever searching
> some particular areas of that space. Leaving the system free to devise
> its own reproductive strategies opens up the possibility of exploring
> areas of the state space that "programmer/user-selected" methods might
> not. 

Solution: A GA organism does not only represent a "vector" in the 
solution space of the domain problem, but also has (seperately) 
encoded a "vector" in _reproduction method space_ (e.g. Weights 
of crosss-over, mutation; Number of cross-over points, etc.  A big 
research area?)

This way, the evolutionary method which converges most quickly for the
domain at hand will be converged to!  And this way, you don't have to
strain so hard to decided how much of biology to simulate.

Yeah, I was just thinking about evolution a month ago, and said to my
friend over lunch, "you ever realize that the manner by which evolution
takes place evolves?"

To go a step further, for systems that use GAs on-line (such as
schedulers?), use GA technology to evolve the evolutionary method
_off-line_. 

---------

This comparison between tierra-like systems and GAs reminds me: In the
former, an effective upper-limit on time spent running an organism's 
program is implicit in the organism's environment.  In the latter, 
the Halting Problem prevents us from using all-out models of 
computation.  But I haven't heard these things mentioned 
explicitely...  Haven't they been addressed?

---------

Has there been any work using evolutionary systems to teach a computer
English?  (I'm in Natural Language Processing.)  References appreciated.