If Darwin Could Write Code

Posted by Jake Good
on Apr 29, 07

I gave my little (read: 70 minute) talk about Genetic Algorithms at the Twin Cities Code Camp yesterday.



My thoughts on how I did? Well… the intro/beginning was really really really rough. Yikes! The concept of genetic algorithms isn’t too entirely new or exciting, I mean… it’s just evolution and natural selection modeling right? It heated up during the demo and sparked some conversation and good questions during the talk…



One of the things that I tried to express was the emphasis on creativity and modeling for a GA being something that you should play around with.



My demos took up most of the time, with some really interesting conversations going on with the people in the room. I think this part was probably the best and definitely something that every Code Camp talk should have!



Here’s the slide deck: CodeCampDarwin.zip



Here are my demos:



C# - EvolveStuff… I meant to show some code, but unfortunately I was having issues with Vista (who isn’t?) and couldn’t give them the real deep dive code. The code is only slightly baked and includes one tiny model. This code WILL be changing from time to time as I have time to play around with it.



How to get it? - svn co http://evolvestuff.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/



Java - GAFramework… This was a sweet project I worked on at college… setup to run a 6 attribute Checkers Player. This is a NetBeans project and shouldn’t be too terrible to figure out. It’s hard coded to work with Checkers, but if you follow the code (written in college mind you), you should be able to apply any model to it.



How to get it? - download, unzip, install NetBeans, and go!



Ruby - You can’t have what I wrote… it’s too incredibly terrible and wasteful, I only used the small expression builder that I wrote to spark their thoughts around Genetic Programming…



Thanks Jason, it was a good turnout!

Comments

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  1. Michael – Apr 29 07 @ 12:50PM

    Hey Jacob. I attended the session yesterday and was very intrigued and would like to learn more. Are there any books that your recommend regarding GA that you found useful? Thanks for posting the C# code.

  2. Jake Good – Apr 29 07 @ 12:50PM

    Thanks for the feedback! I just sent you an email with some more details…

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