Slashdot Mirror
Genetic Algorithms Improve Combustion Engines
University of Wisconsin Madison's Peter Senecal has
evolved a new
combustion engine which cuts nitric oxide emissions three-fold, soot
emissions by fifty percent and fuel consumption by fifteen percent. His genetic
algorithm searches for the best combination of six parameters which determine
the design of an engine. It starts from a search space of five, and includes
strong heuristics to minimize the search space considered.
Listen, a GA doesn't care about hills in the search space. This isn't a gradient based technique (hill climber). The strength of a GA is in it's ability to search a large design space and not get stuck on local maxima.
-Put a stop to procrastination... Later....
My main concern is whether the engine can work well in the real world. Getting efficiencies in a test cell is easy (I have an acquanitence who designs engines. He has a test engine with variable compression ratio. On a good day, he can keep it running for a while at a compression ratio of 30. It's a *long* way from being roadworthy.) The variation you see on the road is much larger than in a test cell, or in other applications, like aerospace--conditions that a car engine take for granted could raise hob with an airplane engine. F'rinstance, wildly changing loads over a matter of a few seconds.
Still, the GA design methodology sounds interesting. I wasn't clear how they avoided getting stuck on local minima. Is this what the 'mutation' handled?
Or do you mean "how much will the oil cartels pay to silence this one"?
The voices in my head don't like you
That would be a decent description if there were only one hill, but that's generally not the case. (If it were, you wouldn't need a GA.) The two solutions that breed are often climbing different mountains, and the children end up somewhere between, which could be on yet another mountain, or it could just be crap. There are schemes to avoid this (speciation), but they're not often used because they cause other problems (effective reduction of diversity, more tendency to get stuck in local maxima (sticking with your up-is-good)).
I don't recall seeing crash test results for the Lupo in particular, but I've definitely seen them for other small cars. They're by no means universally worse than larger cars - in some examples they're better. Bigger cars can be safer but they're by no means guaranteed to.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
What!? I can't really argue with the first statement, but the second is demonstrably untrue. Hemi-heads and domed pistons most certainly produce 'better' engines. It's not as touted as the Chrysler 426s were, but many of today's four cylinders are hemi-heads.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
At least there could be well-defined connectors and space constraints. You could get a new (evironmentally friendly) engine and just slide it in your old car. Other parts could also be standardized. If the radiator was standard you could exchange it for the ozone-eating grille that Volvo developed (ozone at the ground level is a Really Bad Thing for many people).
Maybe cars are too advanced (read organic, tightly coupled) so that modularity would hurt performance, though, e.g. safety
An open-source car spec could be designed on-line.
Oh, but I forgot, it's not about *avoiding* accidents, is it?
Oh, I'm all for avoiding accidents. Funny how the insane drivers tend to avoid very large, high visibility objects when they are recklessly weaving in and out of traffic.
By the way, that article was pretty damn funny. Yep, that's how I feel about it -- I can afford it, therefore I will drive a tank.
P.S. Excuse if this is a duplicate -- Slashdot is being wacky.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
To Americans this may seem strange, but many small European cars do 70-80mpg. A friend of mine has a Volgswagen Lupo (small, but five seats) that he drives 100 miles a day. It does 85mpg.
The Lupo is actually not street legal (I'm pretty sure it was the Lupo) in the US.
It's too small or too light one, I can't remember. But I wanted to have one imported for the obscene fuel efficiency. Instead we got a diesel new beetle and get about 50mpg.
But remember, small doesn't mean fuel efficient, my Geo Metro is only a little bit bigger than the Lupo and only gets about 30mpg. And of course things like the Z3 and the Miata get about 15-20mpg.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
An aritcle in Scientific American (March 2000, sorry, not on the web) discussed GA for use in sovling complex problems like engine design, routing, etc. They pointed out that this technique yields good solutions, and tends to yield better solutions the longer you let them run. However, it isn't really intended to find the absolute optimal solution. To do that, you need a crafstman/artisan to optimize it by hand. GA may be for wimps (X-p), but it will produce good (or very good) results reasonably quickly.
Also, I agree that the product of the evolutionary process will probably yield designs (or software) that will work well, but which may be pretty incomprehensible to the people who produced it. Refer to the earlier comment by "roman_mir":
>>>At the end a computer program was generated that sorted the entire string of characters. Interestly enough, the programmer could not figure out exactly how the string was sorted, the software was just too complex to understand (I supposed he did not want to waste time trying).>>>
Each organism that biologists study incorporates (and builds on) legacy functionality from its evolutionary predecessors to solve new problems, or move into new niches. Some basic cellular functions are unchanged from bacteria to people, but obviously lots of others have changed a lot! Figuring out exactly how these critters do what they do isn't easy. Although I don't think it would be a problem with engines or other real-world structures, GA-designed software may have to be studied and analyzed like DNA from a newly identified species.
Of course, if you find/evolve a piece of code that works really well, it can be snipped up, rearranged and combined with other code to make new programs (analagous to transposons, retroviral exchange and recombination) which might work even better.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
I did NOT submit this as anonymous. Slashdot is wacky.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Try Ascend from CMU.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ascend
They have a very good (although very steep learning curve) nonlinear & differential equation optimizer. Handles thousands of variables.
I have been working in the field of engineering integration and MDO for several years now. The company I work for specializes in solving exactly this kind of problem for large manufacturers. I saw another poster who said that it is standard engineering practice to break a problem of any complexity down into smaller chunks. This is absolutely true, except that the chunks are much smaller than you might think. Even designing a single turbine blade in a jet engine requires many (10+) engineers working in unison, sharing their particular expertise such as aerodynamics, heat transfer, mechanical analysis, materials design, finite element modeling, etc. There are so many variables, it is very easy to design an overall system where a manufacturing error in a single part of the system can cause a catastrophic failure. Many companies use a technique known as Six Sigma to limit the error rate in the manufacturing process. Basically, you apply statistical techniques to the design process in a way that guarantees a certain level of quality in the product. The "6" in six sigma comes from the level of quality expected by applying the process. For a six sigma process, the overall error rate should be less than 1 in 3,000,000. Anyway, by combining six sigma with massive design integration, it is possible (and has been done--I've done it!) to optimize large systems to come up with better overall designs that meet a certain level of quality. I have seen this process applied to engines, plastics + molding, aircraft, electronics, and many other design problems. In many cases, the process will come up with designs that seem counter-intuitive, but are actually very stable, high quality, low cost solutions.
I like my SUV with V8 power just fine. And yes, I want to make sure I have way more weight than you. As far as I'm concerned, it's survival of the biggest.
Well if you people in SUVs didn't drive like FUCKING MORONS that wouldn't be a problem. I moved from Georgia to Maryland a year and a half ago, and it's like no one up here has any idea what a turn signal is for. I see people backing out of their driveways into the street without even looking. 7/10 people talking on their cellphone while driving. People weaving in and out of traffic like madmen. And a lot of the time it's people in bigass Vans, SUVs, and Trucks. Now, up here in the middle of the city, with their sparkly clean Dodge Ram 1500 that takes up 2 parking places, they can't possibly need that kind of vehicle. I've only seen 2 trucks actually carrying anything while I've been here and one of those was a smaller toyota. We need to move towards smaller vehicles, a small toyota truck is enough to haul anything the suburbanites want to carry. A Honda hatchback will carry 5 people easily, if you need more than that get a station wagon. I own a tiny ass little Geo Metro convertible. I'm getting tired of these big black SUVs cutting me off without signalling and changing lines as if I don't exist!!
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I recall that Danny Hillis (ex of Thinking Machines Corp, now works at Disney, I believe) used to do GA stuff. He and some buds made a GA that generated sorting algorithms. But it would get stuck on local minima, and would settle on suboptimal solutions.
So they added another element to the environment -- another set of GA-bred algorithms that generated sets of numbers to be sorted. Their goal was to create data sets that made the array sorters perform poorly! Excellent!
So whenever the sort critters found a nice local minima, the nasty data set generators would find their achilles heel and chase them all away from that area.
I really liked the predator/prey flavour of the idea.
Regards, your friendly neighbourhood cranq
Regards, your friendly neighbourhood cranq
About 25 years ago there was an experiment done by one of our fellow programmers who decided that computer software can be programmed by using Darwin theory of evolution. A large mainframe was programmed to create small pieces of machine code (functions) and then the generated code would run a series of tests and the tests were designed to grade the selected code by utility, the heuristic was accomplishing sorting of a character string. Basically, a generated function would run on input provided by the tester code (where input is a randomized character string) and the output would be compared to a sorted character string. If a strain of code produced output that looked a little like a sorted string, this function would be stored for the future generations. After running this tests for a week, the best family of generated functions was fed back into the mainframe, the test functions were adjusted and some strains of code were introduced into the machine that were written by the programmer that would help to speed up the process. The functions were allowed to mutate and to reproduce by combining features from some functions into new ones. At the end a computer program was generated that sorted the entire string of characters. Interestly enough, the programmer could not figure out exactly how the string was sorted, the software was just too complex to understand (I supposed he did not want to waste time trying).
I think anything at all can be accomplished by GE, the only drawback would be that us - humans - may fall out of the production loop. We will not have to understand why an engine with octagonal and hexagonal and other types of parts work better than something else. It will be too complex for us to understand, and even if we could, who would bother? We would just use the results that appear as if by magic.
But I guess there are drawbacks in all methods...
You can't handle the truth.
Wonderful. Good for you. By all means, live 20 miles from work and burn a couple of gallons of non-renewable, environment-destroying fuel on the way to and from work every day. But, PAY FOR IT AT A REASONABLE RATE. Hey, I pay $1,600/mo for a 400 sq ft apartment in Manhattan, and I'm getting off lucky in this market. I don't complain.
The fact that SUVs can exist, and that so many people can drive them, means that gasoline is simply too cheap, when you take into consideration the damage it does to our environment. Not to mention the damage in quality of life and general integrity of our nation that is done when everyone just gets fatter and fatter and lazier and lazier due to the ridiculously low cost of gasoline.
Actually, I posted the article as an AC because Slashdot refused to let me post -- oh well.
just my blog and pix
Major changes take time in the automotive industry for lots of reasons. They've got to do alot of testing under lots of conditions to make sure that the new idea works all the time. If something turns up broken, it costs them X dollars per car to fix, unlike the software industry that costs them X dollars to make a service pack. Last I remember, the average new car has less than 1 defect of any kind when built... Compare this to software - If it's got only 1 defect, it probably prints "Hello World" and exits.
Then there's costs of changing assembly lines, tooling, test equipment, training...
I agree, it'd be nice if they could get some of these innovations to market quicker, but I also can see why they don't.
The coolness of genetic algorithms, iirc, comes handy in when the math takes so long to perform that it doesn't make sense to cover then entire range of combinations. By hitting a few points here and there you can selectively home in on combination(s) of input variables that yeild the desired results.
According to the article, Caterpillar needs a solution that cuts nitric oxide emissions in half by 2002. So you may see this innovation sooner than you would expect.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
-Put a stop to procrastination... Later....
see subject
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I'm wondering how much is this % in current cars? I guess it's still well below 50%.
--Grey
Aiee, kernel panic: unable to locate God. Universe is going down for reboot NOW!!!!
However, I sure hope I'm wrong.
tcd004
I think you missed the other part of my post, where I said that even if I did own a car, I would want to pay $5.00/gal for gas. In fact, I have owned several cars in my lifetime, and if I lived outside of NYC I would almost certainly have to own a car, for my wife's sake, and I tell you, with absolute certainty, that I would rather pay $5.00 per gallon for gas at that point, as long as everyone else was paying the same, for the benefit of the environment.
The dimples on golf balls act to trip the boundary layer from laminar to turbulent. This transition pushes the point of boundary layer separation to the trailing side of the ball, which reduces the pressure drag on the ball. Note: the transition from laminar to turbulent flow is probably the result of the dimples exciting instabilities in the BL
Now, as for flow control techniques for drag reduction and separation control, this is currently the most active area of fluid dynamics research. I just returned from the AIAA meeting in Denver and participated in a poster session where Boeing/Pratt & Whitney were showing off their C-17 project. Using pulsed jets of air to mix out the jet shear layer more rapidly. United Technologies Research Center had a poster, as well as a nice, talk discussing dynamic flow separation control on helicopter rotor blades. A group from UCDavis was showing off some MEMS MicroFlaps that they are investigating as potential replacments for the large overweight and extremely complex high lift devices found on most large aircraft. Then there was a group at Notre Dame, investigating Phased Plasma actuators (think surface mounted glow plugs) as a means of controlling high speed flows.
The passive techniques used in golf balls is also a large area of interest. I have spent a while talking to some folks from Princeton who've been making measurments for Callaway, and attempting to improve the flight characteristic of their balls. Someone mentioned vortex generators, and feel compelled to mention that NASA Langley, as well as a number of universities, has been playing with MicroVGs for quite a while now. There is also a group of folks using dynamic VGs and fluidic VGs (typically referred to as Synthetic Jets) in the research community.
The biggest problems with the application of flow control techniques to practical problems are size, weight, power requirements, and robustness. I could probably reduce the drag on my Honda appreciably within a couple weeks, using some of the stuff I play with in my lab. BUT the overall fuel efficiency may not make improve noticably due to the power requirements of active controll and passive techniques are typically tuned to a specific set of flow conditions. Then there's the car wash issue...
But what about the cost of mining the ore? Surely it must take quite a bit of energy (most likely in the form of, once again, gasoline) to run the machines that mine the ore. And that transport it to the place where it is smelted. And that transport the resulting steel to the factory.
Of course, the people who do all of this have to get themselves to work, which means more gas burned.
And then there are all of the plastics, and electronic equipment that go into cars. Not only is there a cost in terms of the chemicals and energies needed to produce this stuff, there's the cost of disposing of this stuff when the car is no longer needed.
Finally, the resulting car has to be shipped typically several thousand miles (at least) to the dealer. Surely there is quite a bit of fuel being used up in this process as well.
From this vantage point it really looks to me like burning gas is actually more environmentally friendly than building the car which is going to burn it.
Something similar to this was what caused the horror in the old classic Westworld. The robots had been designed by other machines, which had been designed by other machines... so when things started to go to hell, no one knew what to do!
Yup, they are called water injection engines. There was a famous airplane that used them in WWII. When it needed extra power, it would start injecting water until the engine cooled down too much. It gave it something like 50% more HP for short bursts. There are problems associated with doing this to a normal engine, such as cracking (on cylinder walls, valves from heat cycling) and rust.
On a side note, you get worse gas milage when its foggy because fog usually forms when the air pressure is low. This takes away from performace more than a little moisture will help.
Speeding never killed anyone. Stopping did.
We'll say or do just about anything to maximize our freedom and power. But once we've gotten it, we aren't interested in taking responsibility for our actions.
"It's a free country and I'll spend my money anyway I want. Other people's safty is not my concern. Pollution and waste don't really bother me."
Freedom and power are good things. But a reckless disregard of the greater good isn't. And, yes, you do have the right to define right and wrong for yourself, so do it and be honest about it.
Genetic Programming and Genetic Algorithms really work. Here's the general idea behind genetic algorithms (and a specific example - curve fitting)
1)Express the problem and solution space in terms of a set of numbers.
ex: coefficients on x^i where i steps from 0 to 100.
2)Express a fitness function - this can be very difficult!
ex: testing 1000 different points, fitness = sum of standard deviations
3)Generate a random set of hypothetical solutions to the problem - it's best to generate 100-1000.
4) Test the fitness of each possible solution.
ex. just as stated in 2, sum the standard deviations.
5) Keep all the solutions so far (within reason) and add:
5a)Some mutations of some of them.
ex. change some of the coefficients a bit.
5b)Some crossovers of some of them.
ex. take some coefficients from solution X, and THE OTHER COEFFICIENTS from solution Y.
Note: mutation and crossover policies have to be well designed so as to stop local minimum issues.
6)Go back to 4) until the fitness of a solution is within some threshold of the ideal fitness
(in my example, that might be 10.000000 or something).
Check out the following resource for source code if you want to try it out yourself:
http://www.aic.nrl.navy.mil/galist/src/
There are FAR more "everyday joes" destroying the environment than rich people.
I think that when a fine is used as a punishment (for example, with speeding tickets), then the fine should be based on income, because it is the only way to make the punishment as effective for everyone.
But I'm not talking about a fine - I'm talking about everyone paying the "true" cost of gas, per gallon, when taking in consideration the damage being done to the environment as a result.
As an antenna engineer I use GA's all the time to optimize antennas, filters, polarizers, transitions and other microwave related stuff. The reason it works so good for these problems is that the search space is huge and filled with local minima. I have found that it's always a good thing to use a simpler algorithm such as a hill climber or some sort of gradient based method to really squezze the last few tenths out of the cost funtion though.
GA's are great in finding areas of interest but converge very slowly. Especially considering that electromagnetic simulation is very expensive in terms of memory and CPU.
Of course we run all our optimizations on a Beowulf!
http://www.endwave.com
I had originally used a table of the 15 most common English trigrams (available here), which was not giving me precise enough scores. Then a friend I had met through our mutual struggles to solve the stage sent me his trigraph table. In his words, this is how he described it:
I used Project Gutenberg and downloaded the complete textversions of Bram Stoker's "Dracula" (800KB) and "Wuthering heights" (600KB). I created a huge string out of the text (eliminating everything which is not a - z or A - Z) and ran a window of 3 chars over it, each time noting how many times a particular trigram appreared. I mapped that in an array. Doing like that I created a textfile of 26^3 trigrams and their respective scores (log2(N+1) where N=number a particular TriGram appeared in my sample text. (e.g. The score for 'THE' is about 14.0.)
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
that by the time you pay off the engine, you'll break even with the gas money you're paying... Unless you live in Chicago.
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
I always thought the mechanism of evolution relied on the process of natural selection, and I see no evidence that natural selection for humans exists at all in civilized society. Sure, maybe a hundred years ago, but today those most able to compete seem to have the fewest offspring. Our gene pool is getting worse, not better.
Maybe you have a point about the engineering, though. It'll take genetic manipulation, like in the film Gattaca to improve the gene pool. But that ain't "natural".
There may be hope for us yet!
Love 'em all and let God sort 'em out...
Also a similar concept to "The Two Faces of Tomorrow".
finding a local mininum for cos(x) is easy, finding the global minimum is hard (actually easy, since all the local mins are also global mins, but you can easily make a hard case). So is it true that genetic algorithms are actually better and finding global mins, or are they just another good way of finding local ones?
I've been wanting to do something like this for years...too bad someone beat me to it. (well, I'm sure there have been other, similar things done as well)
[pink beam of light]
But do you want a car that says "I think I can, I think I can..."?
Ok, I will name one: VF04AD from the Harwell library. Which I use all the time to solve problems with 500 variables anyway. Thousands might be a bit hard. As long as a local minimum will do, it isn't that bad. And the article was talking about a mere six, so I still don't see what's hard about that.
Wonder how much the oil cartels will pay for this one.
Finkployd
A genetic pool, eg an interbreeding set of a species is a problem solving algorithm. Diverse successful attributes are collected and all sorts of combinations are tried. The main factor on whether a population converges too early is selective pressure. The higher the selective presure the less tolerant the enviornment is toward keeping less successful (but perhaps very useful) genetic information.
.
As for your lab vs. real life example: The quality of the computer simulation is the essential ingredient. The GA is well studied. Who cares if you optimise for the wrong enviornment?
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
A saying I've heard and take to heart: "If you want me to believe in a ghost, catch it, and nail it to the barn door."
t
I've actually thought a bit about the wind resistance thing. ....
I heard once that the dimples on a golf ball create little
spherical air vortexes(sp?) over the dimple which makes them
less wind resistant. Couldn't you make little dimples on
the cars front fender and hood to improve the air flow?
May not be asthetically pleasing to having a pockmarked car
(and hard to paint) but if it got you better gas mileage
That's something that still takes a bit more gut feeling and intuition than most mathematicians are comfortable with, but it's the kind of decisionmaking that engineers make all the time.
--
Ancient Goth: Someone who overthrew the Roman Empire.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
> More likely a raindrop.
Doesn't a raindrop form some sort of a flattened disk, then dome as it gets larger, then break up? Raindrops are only the typical raindrop shape on a surface.
I wish I could find the link to an article I read about a year ago... basically saying that the people who originally used the SUV type vehicles for real work (ranchers, etc.) can now no longer afford to buy them... psychotic, eh?
I'd suspect that the population size is probably pretty closely related to the complexity of the sample space. This particular example was looking at a system with only 6 parameters, so it may not have needed as large a generation size to get acceptable results. Of course they were also able to start out with the best known design rather than a random starting location (as many GA's use) so their search space may have been even more constrained than the number of parameters alone suggests.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
So let's all take busses or trains, or, why not, bikes for transport means.
--Grey
Aiee, kernel panic: unable to locate God. Universe is going down for reboot NOW!!!!
--Grey
Aiee, kernel panic: unable to locate God. Universe is going down for reboot NOW!!!!
If your *that* keen on having to pay so much for 'gas' (or petrol as we call it in the UK) try 85.9 pence per litre (that's over 4 UK pounds a gallon). 85 percent of this is tax, which goes straight to the government and is NOT spent on public transport or anything else good for the environment. I'm currently incapacitated and the only way I can get around is by relying on lifts from kind friends and family. Think about the part of the population that's disabled and can't get round on there own. Rant over.
Engineers use GAs to a significant degree, it's true. The reason? It's a lot easier to use a GA than to come up with an intelligent solution.
Genetic algorithms are, when you boil it down, a randomized search with a heuristic. Being randomized, you're not sure if you have the best answer. Their use usually doesn't even make solving problems that much faster. You spend about the same amount of time, and get a solution which isn't optimal.
GAs sure sound sexy and are an interesting idea, but they really don't stand up to thinking about a problem and constructing a good deterministic solution. They're popular not because they're better, but because they're easier. There are plenty of journals focused on them: why? Because nobody really has spent the effort to really figure out how to make them work well almost all of the time. (At least neural networks have a strong theoretical basis in linear equations.) You don't see journals on alpha-beta pruning or A* search because they're tried and true techniques, unlike these monkey randomized searches that people think are cool because their name suggests biology and therefore intelligence.
Actually, it's because us Europeans use bigger gallons
1 US gallon = approx 0.83 imperial gallons
- Andy R
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
So if anyone ever asks you "how is a heart like a raindrop?", now you know.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Electrical cars have a bit of an advantage over regular cars. The electric motors which drive the car become generators when you brake and can reclaim energy from the cars momentum.
So an electric car has an energy input that straight gasoline cars don't. MPG may be a little deceptive. They can certainly do better but it's not all due to the engine.
But what about the cost of mining the ore? Surely it must take quite a bit of energy (most likely in the form of, once again, gasoline) to run the machines that mine the ore. And that transport it to the place where it is smelted. And that transport the resulting steel to the factory.
This does indeed take energy; however, the point to bear in mind is that smelting takes a *huge* amount of energy - comparable to the chemical binding energy of the ore (for obvious reasons).
One kg of ore has a chemical binding energy in the realm of 2 MJ (assuming 200 kJ per mol of oxygen molecules stripped).
By contrast, to haul that 1 kg of ore and 99 more kg of rock bearing it up a 1 km mine shaft takes about 1 MJ. And that's under pretty extreme conditions.
And then there are all of the plastics, and electronic equipment that go into cars. Not only is there a cost in terms of the chemicals and energies needed to produce this stuff, there's the cost of disposing of this stuff when the car is no longer needed.
Producing plastics is cheap - it's just fractional distillation and catalyzed reactions, neither of which take up much energy.
Similarly, disposal is cheap, as there isn't much hazardous waste in a car (just the battery, mainly).
Again, the important thing to bear in mind is how mind-bogglingly dense chemical energy storage is. That's why smelting is so substantial a chunk of the energy cost of building a car, and that's also why even the smelting cost is dwarfed by the gasoline consumed in driving the car.
Finally, the resulting car has to be shipped typically several thousand miles (at least) to the dealer. Surely there is quite a bit of fuel being used up in this process as well.
Not at all. Hauling a car in a transport cart is actually less energy-expensive than driving it the same distance (that's why transport carts are used). Over its lifetime, the car will have easily a hundred times that distance put on it - the dealer transport distance is insignificant by comparison.
From this vantage point it really looks to me like burning gas is actually more environmentally friendly than building the car which is going to burn it.
I'm afraid that I still disagree, for the reasons stated above. However, I do compliment you on a very well though-out argument (I don't see that very often).
I read several months in (in Popular Science IIRC) that airplane manufactures were finding that less drag was produced from dimpled surfaces on their airplanes in wind-tunnel tests. They cited the golf-ball's dimpled surface in the explanation. If this could be applied to airplanes where wind-resistance is a little more of a factor, could not the same thing be applied to cars?
Frankly even if it gave me 10 miles/gallon more I wouldn't drive it if it looked as bad as I think it would look. :)
-Zane
This sig is worse than my last.
Chalk one up for the GA. (Multiple design variables, multiple constraints, oh yeah!) It pays to be down in the trenches using this stuff on real problems, not academic trivia.
nuff-z-nuff
-Put a stop to procrastination... Later....
They're speed holes! They make the car go faster!
--
This is not my sandwich.
IMHO the Oil Cartels have *snuffed* anyone who upsets their power. This includes that dude who invented the H20 internal combustion engine. His remains are rotting in a dungeon somewhere underneath the Shell/Texaco/etc Company HQ somewhere. Don't trust them, never will! Kirch
Diligence is the price of Freedom
Isn't it interesting that my post was Insightful, even though I only stated what was in the article for folks who hadn't read it?
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
...while SAs search in random directions.
Other than that not a whole lot...
(I've only seen this mentioned in an obscure thesis once, but I firmly believe it should be a permanent part of the Global Optimization folklore.)
Do you see? We don't go over the entire sample space at all: we take a guess, look at the area of sample space around the guess and head in the best looking direction. Keep going (with a little randomness thrown in to make sure we don't get stuck on a solution that's only better than a tiny area of sample space just around it) and we tend to end up in a damn good place. Do it several times ('cos you might just end up in a different damn-good-place the next time around) and you're left with a bunch of really good approximations to a solution. Pick the best of these. You end up having only actually done the calculations for a very few engines (sample points); you tend to have ignored vast tracts of hideously misbegotten engines that, eg, pump in 14 gallons of fuel a minute and never get hot enough to light it, that your infinite number of monkeys would have built at some stage.
nal 11
What's the minimum for cos(x)? One variable, massive search space... (well, cheating really, but you get the point... :) Finding minimums, is... hard... And numerical optimizers are REALLY bad at doing non-linear problems, having worked with CPLEX and a few others of its ilk. CPLEX, in specific, is great for linear problem solving, I rather liked using it... but it did squat when it came time to work on the non-linear problems (nuclear waste stream disposal -- very cool stuff, check out M.A.W.S.)
This is probably flamebait but if I don't say it I will explode.
Considering how long it took for hybrid cars to finally be produced (special thanks to Texaco for buying most of the patents to preventing a hybrid car from being mass produced) I have a bad feeling that one of the oil companies will try their hardest to prevent genetic algorithms from improving the average cars engine. I don't know how they will prevent, whether it be that they buy up some patents (if there are any) or what.
Considering that I have know about hybrid cars sence the mid-nineties and considering that they are finally being produced this year... I just don't have the faith enought to believe that this will be applicable for quite some time.
That, on top of the fact that the US seems to have a SUV fetish right now. It is almost like people are proud of the fact that they get ten gallons to the mile... er... ten miles to the gallon.
While I'm on this subject I would just like to thank Toyota for producing the first mass produced hybrid car. Now all of us who admire things like the Geo Metro can move to something even better.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
The way I understood it, the article only said that he started each generation with a population of 5.
Those 5 then mutated, interbred and so on, some of them dying, untill there were to many, and all but 5 was killed. And so on.
Bjarke Roune
This is due in no small part to the constraints of golf ball design (spherically symmetrical, to name the bigest). On larger objects and/or those which can actually be optimised for one direction of movement, laminar flow is usually better for cutting drag. On the other hand, it's possible that controlled turbulent flow might improve the drag figure of a car somewhat and at less cost than other means. Then you get into little details like the technical ability to produce a nice finish on a bumpy surface, customer acceptance... the best drag-reducing trick in the world won't save a drop of gas if nobody will buy a vehicle that uses it.
--
Ancient Goth: Someone who overthrew the Roman Empire.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Automotive News, May 22, 2000 v74 i5875 p4
EPA plan could mean more diesels. (Brief Article) HARRY STOFFER.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2000 Crain Communications, Inc.
WASHINGTON - A federal plan to cut pollution drastically from large trucks and buses could have another big impact: far more diesel engines in future cars and light trucks.
The EPA's newly proposed rules to slash emissions from trucks more than 8,500 pounds include a provision to cut sulfur in diesel fuel by 97 percent.
Besides helping the big trucks' emission-control equipment work properly, low-sulfur fuel would free automakers to put advanced diesels in cars, vans, pickups and sport-utilities, government and industry officials say.
``It's a solid, solid step in the right direction,'' said Reg Modlin, director of environmental and energy planning for DaimlerChrysler.
Internal industry studies show that clean, efficient, smooth-running diesels, under some scenarios, could capture up to 25 percent of the light vehicle market within 10 years, Modlin said.
POLITICAL FIGHT
A bruising political fight is ahead for the EPA's proposal. Automakers tend to favor the plan but want more sulfur removed than the EPA is proposing. The petroleum industry, which has significant clout in Washington, vows to fight the proposal.
The Clinton administration will hold public hearings but still hopes to adopt the rules by the end of the year.
Margo Oge, director of EPA's office of transportation and air quality, said she believes the agency fuel plan is sufficiently tough to make diesels clean enough for new-car and light-truck pollution rules.
Those rules, commonly called Tier 2, were adopted late last year. They take effect in 2004.
Jo Cooper, president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, applauded EPA's low-sulfur proposal but said more is needed.
Besides even stricter sulfur limits, carmakers want other fuel properties changed to improve diesel performance and eliminate its familiar knocking sound.
Current diesel fuel is limited to 500 parts per million of sulfur, a naturally occurring contaminant. The EPA is proposing a cut to 15 parts per million.
The petroleum industry suggested a cap of 50 parts per million. Automakers would prefer 5 to 10 parts per million, said alliance Vice President Gloria Bergquist.
Environmental groups strongly favor EPA's new truck and bus rules, but some still don't want to see more diesels in cars and light trucks. Jason Mark, transportation analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said even if common vehicle pollutants are cut, diesels still will have other toxic emissions.
GOOD FOR ENVIRONMENT
Frank O'Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust, said his group tends to be fuel-neutral. If a diesel engine can be made as clean as a gasoline engine, then there is no reason to oppose it.
As for the truck and bus requirements, O'Donnell said, ``Basically it's a ten-strike'' for the environment.
Generally, the builders of engines for large trucks and buses say the rules will be a challenge, but they are prepared to meet them - an attitude similar to that taken by automakers last year toward Tier 2.
The petroleum industry, which balked at Tier 2 provisions cutting sulfur in gasoline to an average of 30 parts per million and maximum of 80 parts per million, is taking an even harder line on the proposed diesel cap of 15 parts per million.
Said Ed Murphy, manager of refining, marketing and transportation for the American Petroleum Institute: ``We're going to do everything we can'' to block it.
They do exist in a variety of implementations. What you refer to is the "island model" for evolutionary algorithms, of which there are many variations on the theme. Another use for parallel architectures is for mitigating computationally expensive operations, which typically are the individual fitness calculations.
Here is an example of a Beowulf cluster being used for genetic programming.
MAC | A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
and it's like no one up here has any idea what a turn signal is for. I see people backing out of their driveways into the street without even looking. 7/10 people talking on their cellphone while driving. People weaving in and out of traffic like madmen. [...] We need to move towards smaller vehicles, a small toyota truck is enough to haul anything the suburbanites want to carry.
Er, how does driving a smaller car automatically make people better drivers? But moving on...
My experience here in So Cal is exactly the opposite. It's the little micro-cars that weave in and out of traffic, because they can. It's hard for a behemoth to nimbly slice through traffic.
Hey, if you want to drive a crackerbox death trap, more power to you. But you make my point for me. There are huge numbers of idiot drivers out there, armed with huge machines of death. However, I don't drive like a maniac, so if I get into an accident, it's much more likely that it's going to be some other fool's fault. And if that fool is going to try to take me out, I feel no guilt in doing everything in my power to win the battle.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
MAC | A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I wonder which does more damage to the environment - burning up more gas in an old car, or building a new one.
That's simple enough to estimate.
Most of the effort (not cost) that goes into making a car goes into smelting the metals used in its construction. Even very complex manufacturing processes take much less energy, and hence cause much less pollution.
The amount of energy needed to smelt the metals in a car is an inefficiency factor times the weight of the oxides you'd get by burning that metal. Lumping all of this together, it Fermis to around a factor of 10.
Let's say you have a tonne of metal (overestimate), and about 33 kg of gasoline in the tank (1/3 of 100).
1000 * 10 / 33 = 300.
If, over the course of the lifetime of the car, you fill the gas tank 300 times or more, you've caused more pollution by burning gasoline than was caused by the fossil fuels burned to smelt metal and produce electricity to manufacture the car.
If you do the math -- and find the theoretical limit to the efficiency of an internal combustion engine (or any heat engine) you will be shocked. A carnot engine (the most efficient heat engine possible) depends on the differnce in temperature between the heated chamber (the gas blowing up in the cylinders) and the temperature of the cool chamber (the radiator.)
We would be much better off if we found a complete replacment for the internal combustion engine. Even an electronic engine (which just feed it's power off of a power plant which is also a heat engine) is better because in a power plant you can get a much hotter heated chamber.
I am glad that their evolution program works. But let's face it a randomized algorithm that finds a miximum (or a minimum) based on processes that happen in nature is not exactly new. See simulated annealing or nueral nets. These techniques, although they work, are kind of wishy washy. In practice I find you use them when all else fails and then you end up playing with your program a lot (let's change this and see what the hell happens.)
Note also that his work is being funded by Caterpillar. Any possible fortunes to be made are probably already addressed in the fine print.
Genetic algorithms can be used to optimize all sorts of problems.
For example this page describes optimization of wind turbines with genetic algorithms.
Like all engineering problems, the biggest challenge with these sorts of problems is determining the formulae to predict performance. A great deal of knowlege about engines needs to be used to develop these simulations. If you can't model what effects changes in the shape of turbines or cylinders will have on performance, then you can't build a fitness function. The fitness function is used to determine which gene sequences will "live" and which ones will "die".
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
-Put a stop to procrastination... Later....
Caterpillar was talking about a highly advanced diesel which would break the 50% thermal efficiency figure using insulated pistons and cylinder heads, an insulated exhaust system, a turbocharger operating at 70% efficiency and turbocompounding. I heard nothing since, and have no idea what happened to it; maybe the high combustion-chamber temperatures would have created too much NOx, and the Clean Air Act consigned it to the junkyard. If so, perhaps genetic algorithms can salvage the technology and bring us some benefits (and relief from OPEC price gouging) in the bargain.
--
Ancient Goth: Someone who overthrew the Roman Empire.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
This is true, but if you're driving an old car instead of buying a new one, you're helping the environment also, so perhaps it balances out.
...
I wonder which does more damage to the environment - burning up more gas in an old car, or building a new one. Considering the amount of energy and effort that must go into building a new car, I would say that it might actually be more environmentally sound to drive one that is old and uses more gas, than to buy a new one.
Anyway, I have no sympathy for people who whine about gas prices. If you're going to destroy the environment, then you should pay for it. And you should pay for it at a rate far greater than the rate at which you currently pay for gas in the U.S. Like, say, $5.00/gal. I would be SO happy if gas went up to $5.00/gal (as long as it wasn't just the oil companies getting rich, but instead a tax which go to something useful).
And no, I don't own a car, or any motor vehicle at all in fact (I live in NYC where they are less than useless), but even if I did, I would still want to pay $5.00 to be reminded every time I went to the pump what damage I was doing to the world. And of course, I want everyone else to be reminded of that as well.
Hey America - get off your fat asses, get out of your SUV's, and try *walking* or *biking* to work (or, if it's too far, then - heaven forbit - move closer to work!)
A GA certainly does care about hills in the search space --- but you're also right in that it's not just a simple hill climber. How can this be so? Well, a simple hill climber just looks around it and always heads upward. If you have a search space that has a tiny hill next to a huge one, and you start a hill climber on the slopes of the tiny one, it'll chug up to the top of the tiny hill and sit there.
Now, a GA throws in a random element as well. That's to say, the next step for a GA doesn't always have to be in the 'up' direction. So start a GA on the tiny hill, and if it's random enough the population that forms the next generation will be spread out all over the tiny hill and partially up the slope of the massive hill. Natural selection then comes into play, and the parents of the next generation are the guys and gals who are climbing the mountain. Next generation, the population will be spread even further up the slope --- and of course the ones at the top get to be the mums & dads...
Of course, you can see that if the GA isn't random enough (too low mutation rate, or not enough variance in the gene pool), the GA could quite easily get stuck on the little hill. This is why when we solve problems with GAs, we tend to use lots of different starting points: we know that each starting point will probably lead us to a different (but large) local maximum, so we try to get them all.
(You could try increasing the randomness. You can see where this leads: too much randomness and you might as well be doing a random search; you're destroying the 'partial solution' that your genetically-bred creatures have found at each step.)
nal 11
When using a very large, genetically diverse population it doesn't matter very much how hilly the search space is. When you are using a small population of 5, it matters a lot more. The technique described in the article is akin to taking a bunch of random steps in the seach space and following the one that turned out the best. If the terrain is too hilly, this isn't any better than randomly guessing a bunch of parameters and picking the set that worked best.
Can somebody write a GA that will produce a Troll that is both original and funny? Then it might be worth reading at 0 or -1.
"What are the three words guaranteed to humiliate men everywhere?
In Republican America phones tap you.
Never mind that the speed limit is enforced and the average SUV driver* has never gone offroad in his/her collective life, but we still need MORE POWER!
I don't know about anyone else, but I want power for acceleration, not top speed. I used to have a diesel MB that had unbelievably bad acceleration. It got to the point where I was literally afraid to change lanes because there was no margin for error.
I like my SUV with V8 power just fine. And yes, I want to make sure I have way more weight than you. As far as I'm concerned, it's survival of the biggest.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
that was not a fictional story! the system is called tierra, and while there's some not-particularly-exciting stuff associated with it, you can download the source code and have hours of fun with it... and there's some pretty interesting reading and so on: the tierra project.
note: i haven't looked at this site in a couple of years (except just now to verify that it really still exists), so the project may be defunct... looks like everything's still there, though.
Hybrids aren't doing anything that's exactly new. The Honda Insight gets 70 MPG, but the Geo Metro and Chevy Sprint were both capable of around 50 MPG. That didn't make them sell any better; they weren't what people wanted. The Insight, in particular, is a dog performance-wise; its batteries and little sustainer engine don't have the guts to accelerate it quickly. Expect to see buyer resistance from people who feel that getting up to traffic speeds, or the ability to pass, are more important than cutting $10 a week from their gasoline bill. Fixing this will require another technology, such as flywheels instead of batteries for energy storage. I hope that the public image of hybrids isn't completely soured before this happens.
Of course, a crisis which kicks the price of gasoline up to $4/gallon would change the equation pretty quickly. The clown who paid $38,000 for a huge honkin' SUV might not care that his fuel bill went from $2000 to $4000, but most people would. If you affect the buying preferences of most people (and by extension, the used-car market beginning about 2 years down the road), you'll have made a big difference.
--
Ancient Goth: Someone who overthrew the Roman Empire.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Already cars getting 70 miles per gallon have been created simply by being dual electical/internal combustion.
To Americans this may seem strange, but many small European cars do 70-80mpg. A friend of mine has a Volgswagen Lupo (small, but five seats) that he drives 100 miles a day. It does 85mpg.
The main reason for this is fuel costs. A litre of fuel costs about 80p (in UK). That translates to $5.76 a gallon. You'd drive a fuel efficient car at that price.
Or just move to a state that doesn't have smog testing to begin with. Around here if there is a place to screw a license plate onto it, it is street legal. Registration is done entirely by mail. No inspections, no smog check, no hassles.
I'm suprised I havn't seen anything about Hydrogen or other fuel use in cars on here. Such as what they did on http://www.layo.com and many other web sites. Why just try and find an end to smog when you can find an end to the over use of fossil fuels while your at it?
It's sad you don't see as much news about it. Espically with the high cost of gas in some areas.
My experience here in So Cal is exactly the opposite. It's the little micro-cars that weave in and out of traffic, because they can. It's hard for a behemoth to nimbly slice through traffic.
I grew up in So Cal and my experience is that SUV drivers tend to be pretty shitty, but then again )(and I have to agree with you after 8 months of commuting from Hollywood to S.M.), that everyone is a pretty shitty driver there.
Driving a small car doesn't necessarily make one a better driver, but given their nimbleness, it makes it more likely the driver of one will be able to avoid the accident, in the first place. I prefer to view safety BMW-style (performance), not Cadillac-style(weight)...
just my blog and pix
GAs tend to be useful in discrete problems, where standard non-linear optimizers don't apply. Even there, GAs are often inferior to other stochastic algorithms. In general, the use of a genetic algorithm requires more performance evaluations than simulated annealing, and frequently more than simple stochastic hill-climbing.
There's one key exception, however. If the objective function has essentially cylindrical optima (e.g. the function f(x, y) = (1 - x^2) * (1 - y^2)), then the crossover operator allows the system to use "hyperplane search": the "crossover operator" (used in the generation of the new population members) will frequently tend to take the good parts of different candidates and glue them together, making better offspring.
What's sometimes surprising is how many objective functions can be encoded so that they have roughly cylindrical optima relative to the cross-over operator. For instance, in the old work on the Travelling Salesman Problem, van Gucht et al. used segments of circuits as crossovers, and that gives a roughly hypercylindrical objective function, thus speeding up convergence.
All this means that without actually looking at the particular objective function and encoded, we can't really tell whether the use of the GA was wise or not. It depends on the constraints of the problem.
You drive 20 miles to work?!? WTF? Here in Atlanta we drive 60 miles to work, and, no, I am not making that up. If only they'd extend MARTA...morons.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
RFC 2795 obligatory IMPS (The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite)
-- A kick in the pants is worth 8 to the head.
Thanks for the link. I think I'll use that as a reference when I'm evangelizing Linux in the scientific community :-)
-- Good judgement comes with experience. -- Experience comes with bad judgement.
I lately read an article about a way to cut fuel consumption to half. A little gadget mixes the fuel with water and because water will expand a lot more when getting hot, the efficiancy of the engine goes up while fuel consumption goes down. And the whole thins whould work with most modern engines. It would require just some tweaks in the injection system.
The guy who invented this hold a patent for this for years, but still no car company wants to build it....
AC wrote:
;-)
There is much debate about whether this is actually useful. One simple way to check would be to change the human genome structure so it never mutates, and see whether human progress over the next million years is obstructed
Actually, at this point in time with respect to technology, it won't matter one bit if we stop mutating.
Evolution has lost; the future belongs to engineering.
--
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Then you definitely would not want to pay $5.00 for a gallon of gas.
As others have stated, the extra cost would not go to benefiting the environment, thus I am correct in stating the obvious. Oh, and also, I'd hate it very much if gas went up for no reason. Now, if all that extra money were used to build DECENT PUBLIC TRANSIT in here, I may bitch a little less, because I'd also use the public transit. Don't assume everyone's fat and lazy who has to drive their car to work, now.
Things you need to know about Kansas City Metro:
- public transportation isn't
- housing near the business corridor in Office Park isn't cheap or available in most cases
- just try getting transferred to another position in the same company where you're all the sudden required to work downtown (when you live in the south), or work farther south or west (increasing your walk time by about 15 miles)...
My point is, I'd use my own energy reserves to get to work if it were feasible, but let's be realistic.
--
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
That means that they had an existing engine which they could tweak, and they wanted to input variables into the GA which could be altered in a controlled fashion on the engine. I believe that the three parameters listed can be controlled by the onboard computer, making it almost trivial to test different configurations: just change the parameters in the computer. Then turn the engine over, run her through her paces, and look at the data. Your GA predictions have been tested.
The next step will probably put that engine on the road, to be tested in real situations, and maybe they will then use a population closer to 50 or 60 on the next set of predictions. Variables I can think of: number of cylinders; diameter of cylinders; stroke of piston in each cylinder; should the cylinders be identical in dimensions or should some be bigger?; one engine in the front with 8 cylinders, or one engine at each wheel, each engine having 2 cylinders?; material for the block; should the block be one material and the surfaces be coated with another?; which material for the coating?; number of spark plugs per cylinder; configuration of spark plugs in each cylinder; should that configuration be the same for each cylinder?; material(s) the piston is made out of; fuel injection port(s) and configuration ...
Well, I think you see what I mean. This GA was easy to test, because a few parameters were used, and those parameters can be changed easily. Test it easy at first, and make the tests more complex as you do more.
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
Here is an introduction to Genetic Algorithms:
http://cs.felk.cvut.cz/~xobitko/ga/
Here is another example of a Generic Algortihm put to use, this time to apparently massively improve the wiring and therefore performance of Beowulf clusters:
http://www.arstechnica.com/c pu/2q00/klat2/klat2-1.html
Bjarke Roune
That's great, except for the fact that it's bad for the environment, and fails in the long run. It's a personalized and temporary solution to a global problem.
--
Ancient Goth: Someone who overthrew the Roman Empire.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I don't know for sure, never having talked to senecal about his research (combustion research isn't my field), but I suspect a factor might have been the amount of time it takes to test each member of the population. Each simulation of an engine takes many hours, and I believe the limit was 4 jobs per person at the time he was probably running those simulations.
It's cool to see something I was actually tangentially involved with on slashdot! ;) I used to work as the sys admin at the UW-ERC where this work was done. The "SGI supercomputer" referred to in the article is probably the Origin 2000 with 32 R12000 CPUs running at 300 Mhz and 16 gig of ram.
--Kevin, former ERC sys admin
--LeBleu
If you're reading this you're part of the mass hallucination that is Kevin the Blue.
*coughsputtersputterwheeze* "That's funny, as soon as we crossed the Kansas state line the car stopped."
:-)
Sorry, couldn't resist.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
He means raindrop as in the still-falling-through-air variety, which has a spherical front end with a tapered back.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
The typical genetic algorithm uses numbers instead of nucleic acids, but it recombines and mutates its little numeric genes just the same.
--
Ancient Goth: Someone who overthrew the Roman Empire.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
If they wait 10 years, there won't be a need for the technology any more. That's about the timescale on which you will start to see a major shift towards fuel cells.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
From the very brief description in the article, the genetic algorithm seems to function very much like a simulated annealing algorithm. Can anybody comment on the differences between genetic algorithms like the one used in this case and simulated annealing algorithms? Are there any features to a design problem that would make it more amenable to one or the other?
For those unfamiliar with simulated annealing, here is a quick description: Simulated annealing algorithms need some parameters for defining a design and a function for evaluating the quality of a design with a particular set of parameters. The algorithm keeps some sense of temperature which starts high and steadily decreases through the running of the algorithm. The main loop of the algorithm perturbs the design slightly (changes the parameters) and either accepts or rolls back the change with some probability, based on the change in quality caused by the change in the design, and the current temperature.
Ben
Pull your head out of ass and look beyond the confines of your own little world. Elsewhere in the nation, cities are spread out, people actually own land to go with their homes, where you don't hear the toilet flush next door or the couple above you banging away all night, and where you can sit out in the yard at night with a telescope and actually see stars and marvel at how quiet it gets instead hearing honking, cursing, and gunshots 24/7. Out here you drive 20 miles to work. The suburbs are pleasant to live in and the city is for work. Separating the two makes both, better places.
In the appropriate parlance, the shape of a falling raindrop is a "hamburger".
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Perhaps we need to apply this technology to MP3 algorithms.
Just tell it what the best encoder is (lame) and feed it a good test signal and have it compare the generations to the initial signal. This should reveal a free non-copyrighted mp3 codec that would kick major arse.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Given that a lot of these engine tuning parameters are controlled electronically (i.e. timing, etc), and the fact that hardware keeps getting cheaper and faster, wouldn't it be possible to do this genetic modelling "on the fly" (i.e. constantly, during the engine's lifetime)? That way the engine could react to it's own natural wear by "tuning itself".
Variable Valve Technology/Ignition advance/Fuzzy Logic transmissions already exist, but this would be about ten steps beyond...
just my blog and pix
So...the question is...who gets the patent, and what for? Can the engineer really claim that he "invented" this engine because he used GA? Should the algorithm itself be patented? Inventing machines. Food for thought.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Genetic Algorithms are a staple for engineers. About 5 years ago they used almost the same technique to achieve similar results with jet engine turbines. Civil engineers love the stuff especially. Consider the problem of finding the optimal route for a highway through mountains that involves moving the least amount of dirt. The search space is massive, but not so hilly that a GA can't function well.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
Maybe five whole blocks is a lot of distance to you. Maybe you have ready access to good public transit. Or maybe you're an idiot. Any combintion is possible.
Where I am there is a bus system of sort for the small town. The rail line is used strictly for freight. Getting to a city of any size means a one hour drive at minimum. To be realistic and have choice, two hours. I'm here as here is where the job is.
Come on out to the midwest, the real midwest, not a 'population center' (gak!) like Chicago and then see how enthuisiastic you are about high fuel prices. Will you be as thrilled when the high fuel prices translate into higher food prices, too? Tractors need fuel, as do semi-trucks (ok, deisel, not gasoline, but both ahve gone up in price). Why not raise ALL petroleum prices? Of course that has other effects - the natural gas heat and driers (yes, some crops need to be dried, not just tobacco) will cost more too. And home heating.. and it make coal more fiscally attractive.
Sure, the best way is to use less, but just rasing prices (most readily accomplished by overzealous taxation) will accomplish the wrong things. Do you really expect the additional revenue would go to the right place? The best way to run a government is too run it on as a lean mixture as possible.
I may be out here in 'flyover country' but some simple questions remain, which are very midwestern and you had better be able to answer folks out here as they WILL ask them and demand an answer: Who the hell are you to tell me (or anyone other than yourself) how to live? What makes you think you know what we need better than we do? maybe we should decide NYC policies from here, too, hrmmm?
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
Important in fuel efficiency are other factors such as wind resistance, vehicle weight, and power saving devices such as efficient breaks which channel the energy created from breaking back into an electrical engine.
These fuel efficiencies are seperate to the engine, but can be co-dependant. Already cars getting 70 miles per gallon have been created simply by being dual electical/internal combustion.
As a former worker at Ford Motor Company I used a genetic algorithm to optimize fuel efficiency as a function of cost. But maybe I wasn't thourough enough... Is it possible the biggest gain is yet to come when the ENTIRE car model is fed into a genetic algorythm and optimized by geometry, with goals of fuel efficiency and vehicle cost?
-Ben
would he be allowed to patent the algorithm he used? if so then he can make a killing. or the university can if that's how it works over there.
Since your UID is smaller than mine, I can only conclude that you're trolling. -s20451 (410424)
How did you score the keysquares? Did you somehow look how much plain text they produced?
Check out the GARAGe at Michigan State University. They use Genetic algorithms for many different and interesting problems. From consumer preference predicting to financial analysis.
There code is called Gallops, and it seems very scalable. There is a Meta-GA built into Gallops that allows the GA to genetically change itself in order to be the most efficient GA.
This is cool stuff!
Keeping
One might confuse ASA with a "hill climbing" optimizer, but since it has a randomizing parameter (temperature) built in, it can be rationally adjusted to explore regions outside of local optima.
Seastead this.
are really cool. This is the first time I've seen one put to great use. (Just think -- all this time a more efficient combustion engine has been within our reach, without making any serious modifications.)
Hopefully this engine will be made available soon at a reasonable price. Unlike other engines under development, this one uses known and existing technology, so it shouldn't be too expensive to implement.
Too bad there's not a genetic algorithm to improve code efficiency... or is there? We could run it one Linux, Gnome, Windows... (Okay, so that's probably going too far.)
If you've ever taken statistics, that's the long table in the end of the book. I never understood why they didn't supply an equation instead of a big long table until I spent 3 days trying to find the equation with analytical calculus. It turns out that it's impossible to solve via calculus.
I found a crude approximation, but it was too long and involved too much calculation to be useful in my sorting algorithm. Enter genetic algorithms.
I coded up a GP symbolic regression and plugged in all the x and f(x)'s in the table in my statistics book for evaluation in a least squares fit fitness model.
I ran it over and over until it spit out something that deviated by .001 over all the supplied points!
It was a huge equation, however once I got through simplifying all of the fancy 0's and fancy 1's, it transformed into the startlingly simplistic equation of e^x/(e^x + 1) if memory serves me.
I continued to run the GP, and got other equations which deviated even less, however they were more cumbersome and I was looking for something quick for my sorting algorithm.
Interestingly enough, nature has a slight push towards simplicity in that smaller DNA strands replicate quicker and may more quickly exhaust the resources available in competition with other DNA strands. This was demonstrated in an experiment which produced what is known as the "Spiegelman monster", in which a scientist put a small DNA strand in a test tube full of nucleotides, effectively removing competition from the environment. When the scientist later analyzed the contents of the test tube, he found that the tube was dominated by the smallest strand capable of self replication and this strand was dubbed "Spiegelman's monster".
I've tried to incorporate this slight but present push towards simplicity into my fitness functions in GA/GP programming by giving ever so slightly higher ratings to simpler solutions. This also helps the computer out as it may calculate the results on simple solutions more quickly than complex ones.
Anyway, kudos on your inventive application of Genetic algorithms. It struck me as being similar to an genetic search for a fractal compression.
I would guess that your evaluation algorithm involved dictionary lookups and the gibberish to english ratio, but would love to hear further detail.
-- Good judgement comes with experience. -- Experience comes with bad judgement.
The neat thing about Genetic programming is that you could treat each Beowulf node as it's own little Galapagos island. Seed each node with a genetic population (which could vary in size depending on the capability of the node), then every so often, take the fittest of the various populations and use a random wheel to reseed each of the beowulf nodes (or islands if you like to think metaphorically).
You could even vary the fitness models of each node, creating different environments on each node/island. The wonderful thing about Genetic programming is the infinite possibilities.
Repeat this process until something interesting evolves.
-- Good judgement comes with experience. -- Experience comes with bad judgement.
Now that would be a cool thing to try sometime.
Dyolf Knip
--
Dyolf Knip
I've recently learned about Genetic Algorithms (GA) in my quest to win $15,000 from The Code Book and Simon Singh's Cipher Challenge (eGroup here). One of the stages is a deft Playfair Cipher, which have historically proven difficult to solve by hand. Using a genetic algorithm, I was able to solve the cipher in just 28 generations.
What's amazing to me is that here I have just 500 lines of code that know nothing about ciphers, Playfairs and codebreaking, yet using a simple mutation and scoring function was able to break a relatively difficult cipher.
For those that don't know, a Playfair cipher puts the English alphabet into a 5x5 grid (minus 'j') and uses pairs of letters to select other letters from the grid. Instead of a 26-letter substitution cipher, codebreakers are now faced with a daunting 676 letter-pair challenge.
My code created 1,000 random keysquares and mutated them, randomly selecting squares and swapping them with one another, or swapping entire rows and columns. The new generation was scored, and those that scored high had a better chance of making it to the next generation than those that scored low (survival of the fittest, if you will). And in just 28 generations, what was once a mass of jumbled letters slowly transformed before my eyes into perfect English. Once the solution had been found I actually felt bad about killing the process, as if I had creatd life and killed it. It was truly amazing.
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
As far as I know, mutation is not the method to avoid local minima. 'Diversity', to borrow an analogous biological description, is used to prevent local minima. If you have a gene space that accurately samples the entire space, and an algorithm that doesn't kill variation too fast, you will find several local minima, statistically, without being trapped within any of them.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Lower emissions? Nah. Considering their previous track record, manufacturers will most likely see this as an opportunity to put three times the gas-guzzling raw power into their monster SUVs. Great. Never mind that the speed limit is enforced and the average SUV driver* has never gone offroad in his/her collective life, but we still need MORE POWER!
I would lose my faith in the human race, except it's already gone.
* Yes, I know some people actually _do_ go offroad or have a lot of cargo/kids to carry around. The majority don't.
nuclear cia fbi spy password code encrypt president bomb
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
-Put a stop to procrastination... Later....
Rather than focusing on internal combustion engines, maybe they should apply these algorithms to other kinds of engines, like electric/solar/natural gas/etc. to see if they can come up with something smaller and more powerful. Most of these already have polution advantages.
tcd004
Send a PostCard of Janet RenoMargolis!
Can anyone explain why a genetic algorithm is needed here? Conventional numerical optimizers can handle thousands of variables, even for nonlinear problems. The article says there are six parameters, not a big search space at all. Is this really an advance, or just jumping on the genetic algorithm bandwagon?
Ever hear of the Boing777 ? The jet engines were optimized by a GA. Three days worth of computations on a nice piece of hardware probably saved them three years of engineer research.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Does anybody know any more about why the GA the researcher used had such a small population size? Population of 4 + 1 elite seems mighty small to me- 50 or 60 sounds more like it, even if it takes ten times longer per round to evaluate, because you typically want more diversity. Or in this problem did he find that the diversity wasn't worth it? Does anybody know?
--
-jacob
-jacob
There was an article mentioned on /. (I think) a few weeks ago about someone using a GA to create programs that sort strings or something. I think it was something someone did recently, so it must not be what the person above was referring to, but it's the same idea.
I don't seem to have the URL handy at the moment, unfortunately.
-- Wodin
$5.00 per gallon? Well, here in the UK we're ALREADY PAYING MORE THAN THAT.
Standard pump prices here are around 85 pence per litre of unleaded petrol, which equates to about 3.90 per gallon, or about $5.73 per gallon in US currency.
How much do you pay?
Thanks, Anonymous Coward, I'll have the Gin and Tonic ;-)
Or rather a sad one about the current state of the Patent Office?
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
You may only use 'A','C', 'G' and 'T'
This works exactly like the theory of an infinite monkeys on typewriters (See the relevant RFC, please!) producing Hamlet. You have an infinite number of simulated engines, each running a performance test against the others. An infinite number of grease monkeys, per se..
One can only imagine the results he'll get when he expands the simulation beyond the six very basic qualities he's using now.. Perhaps boost pressure, pre-fire advance and ignition retard would be good for the next series of tests..
A 300 horsepower diesel that gets 100 miles to the gallon..
Well, maybe not. And even if he did, no self respecting twit 'American' car buyer would want to be seen driving one.. Oh, Gawd! You're driving a diesel!?!?!?
.sig: Now legally binding!