The Future of Optical Fibre

An anonymous reader writes "An Australian researcher has come up with a novel way of developing optical fibres. Steven Manos, a researcher at the Optical Fibre Technology Centre in Sydney, Australia has developed a method of using genetic algorithims for discovering optimal designs of optical fibres. An article on his work had this to say "The problem with designing optical fibres is starting with a specific set of criteria and then coming up with a design to fit this. The computer program developed by Manos, which is run on supercomputers, does this by mimicking the process of evolution. The computer program combines two patterns to create a third fibre 'offspring', which Manos described as "similar but a bit different". This process is repeated thousands of times with the 10 designs best suited for the particular application chosen to 'breed' again." Another case of "When in doubt, use brute force"?"

Comments

Genetic Algorithm + Hill climbing

[G4from128k]

For exploring real-valued phase spaces, one solution is to combine a GA with a classical hill-climber. A hill-climber evaluates the local gradient (the partial derivatives of fitness with respect to the independent variables) and then makes a directed adjustment of the solution in the direction of better performance. Hillclimbers can reach optima in floating-point spaces very quickly, but tend to get stuck on local solutions.

GAs are great for jumping out of local optima to find new realms of the solution space, but don't converge as quickly on the neighborhood optima. So the combination of a GA with more classical optimzation can work well.