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.)
This works exactly like the theory of an infinite monkeys on typewriters (See the relevant RFC, please!) producing Hamlet.
No it doesn't. That works because, even though the result is very small and the sample space is very big, we bring enough brute-force power to the problem that we have to (statistically speaking) solve it eventually.
You have an infinite number of simulated engines
No you don't --- and this is the entire point of GAs. RTFA:...begins with five "individuals,"...The two fittest "parents" are then allowed to "reproduce" and a new generation is formed...The process is continued through successive generations until the computer identifies the most "fit" member of the group...narrows the field of potentially one billion calculations on the computer down to 200 to 250 of the best possibilities. 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.
so what if there's an O'Reilly VB book? The original post claimed that "there's an O'Reilly book" was a necessary condition for something to be "for geeks", not a sufficient condition. You'd have to find something for geeks for which there is not an O'Reilly book to refute this.
Re:Diversion from the main task/ counterproductive
on
Terminus Demo Released
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· Score: 1
where are all the gigantic walls kids should be making after their addictions to tetris
They've all disappeared as each layer was completed. Seriously, though, why isn't the problem of skiers recklessly running across freeways to get to the ski shop being addressed?
My point is not that IE is an innovation (it's not - someone else invented Web browsers). My point is that the Document Object Model contained in IE4 and 5 is an innovation. Look at the hashup of a DOM that's in Netscape 4. LAYER's --- ugh. The IE DOM is drastically different from any other DOM. Thus it is innovative.
If you screw your eyes up enough, you can even see that File Manager is an app --- I mean, if you've got a DOS prompt and copy, del, md & rd you've got all the file managing capacity you need in an OS, right? You don't need that big fancy application with all it's fancy graphics, right?
You never think about "connecting to the internet", you just work with data that happens to be located somewhere else
Isn't this what Microsoft were trying to do when they talked about "integrating IE into the OS"? Notice how in Win2000, it's difficult to tell whether you've got IE or File Manager open? And how everyone squealed...
I recently heard a story on a newsgroup about a rumour of an unsubstantiated off-the-record comment that indicates that someone might have had their account terminated for saying that Napster was good.
I mean, come on. Perhaps we can have a little more journalistic integrity than posting stories from some nameless submittor about some nameless ISP that allegedly (but there's no proof) kicked out some nameless user. Or perhaps you believe these stories.
Does anyone remember when the web was useful? i.e. when you went surfing from home and you got lots of stuff that you were interested in? Now do you see what's happened when corporations move in and plaster banner ads all over everywhere? Do you think that your mobile phone is useful?
If you're not too interested in the source for these things, there's some cool arcade classics on shockwave.com. Defender , Joust, Spy Hunter and more.
8547236984 Here is your navigator : Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0) Just a security hole of Slashdot. You can find this kind of hole in all sites which has a forum. I think that in site like e-trade you can make some people asks for stocks. You can contact me there : Krakus.Irus à voila.com If you want to retry. If you want to know more.
...when I read through Randal Schwartz's Learning Perl, by page 11 he's already using regular expressions to match strings.
Well, yes - we're learning Perl here, so we start on regular expressions quickly, 'cos they're the good bit. You might want to use substrings and comparisons, but the example he gives is to match a string which begins 'Randal', has a word boundary after that, where case is unimportant. Hack together something that does that in another language --- I bet it won't be as compact and neat as '$name =~/^randal\b/i' unless that language supports regexps too.
Without a suit forcing an unready software release, it only makes sense that software will get better and better.
How can you be so sure? Perhaps removing the 'suits' - ie the people who are actually connected to the market - from the decision making process will give developers the space they need to add all their favourite features. Which, of course, can be simply activated by pressing CTRL-SHIFT-F4 as any luser should be able to remember...
Slashdot Mirror
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.)
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.
<rant>
Netscape Navigator
Internet Explorer
Java
ActiveX
JavaScript
VBScript
Java
C#
</rant>
This is what those nice people at the DoJ mean by the technical term "competition". Most people see it as a good thing.
/. 's already been slapped by MS lawyers for providing links to proprietary MS stuff.
so what if there's an O'Reilly VB book? The original post claimed that "there's an O'Reilly book" was a necessary condition for something to be "for geeks", not a sufficient condition. You'd have to find something for geeks for which there is not an O'Reilly book to refute this.
Hmmm..this site, specifically the page about the head claims that "the design was inspired by Centurian armor, giving Robonaut some attitude."
Still looks more like Boba Fett to me...
Look here for a photo.
My point is not that IE is an innovation (it's not - someone else invented Web browsers). My point is that the Document Object Model contained in IE4 and 5 is an innovation. Look at the hashup of a DOM that's in Netscape 4. LAYER's --- ugh. The IE DOM is drastically different from any other DOM. Thus it is innovative.
- You never think about "connecting to the internet", you just work with data that happens to be located somewhere else
Isn't this what Microsoft were trying to do when they talked about "integrating IE into the OS"? Notice how in Win2000, it's difficult to tell whether you've got IE or File Manager open? And how everyone squealed...I recently heard a story on a newsgroup about a rumour of an unsubstantiated off-the-record comment that indicates that someone might have had their account terminated for saying that Napster was good.
I mean, come on. Perhaps we can have a little more journalistic integrity than posting stories from some nameless submittor about some nameless ISP that allegedly (but there's no proof) kicked out some nameless user. Or perhaps you believe these stories.
Does anyone remember when the web was useful? i.e. when you went surfing from home and you got lots of stuff that you were interested in? Now do you see what's happened when corporations move in and plaster banner ads all over everywhere?
Do you think that your mobile phone is useful?
If you're not too interested in the source for these things, there's some cool arcade classics on shockwave.com. Defender , Joust, Spy Hunter and more.
8547236984
Here is your navigator : Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)
Just a security hole of Slashdot. You can find this kind of hole in all sites which has a forum. I think that in site like e-trade you can make some people asks for stocks.
You can contact me there : Krakus.Irus à voila.com
If you want to retry.
If you want to know more.
is it me, or has slahsdot been slashdotted?
mind you, if you didn't make it out of molecules, it'd be a miracle.
I want the Lazy Gun from Against a Dark Background.
yeah, but you often find that the price for stuff is numerically equal in $ and £. This is why British people don't like regional DVDs