Re: [stack] Evolutionary Programming & presentation-format.

On 10 Jan 2010, at 17:03, chris glur wrote:

> I'm using the subject of Evolutionary Programming as a vehicle to
> discuss presentation-formatting.
>
> The format & sequesnce of presentation of 'joy material' eg.
> on latrobe.edu.au is very strange and frustrating for me.

I found it new and enlightening.


> Rather than only criticize I'll use the post of:-
>    <[email protected]>    Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 4:59 AM
>    Title:  Evolutionary Programming
> to show show how 'it can/should be done' - IMO.
>
>> The idea is to write a program that writes Joy programs, tests them  
>> for
>> fitness against samples of the task data, where the task is do  
>> something
>> like handwriting recognition.
>
> So here's his 'top-goal' which achors the rest of the text and gives  
> it
> direction.  It was called 'top down design' in the 70's. In contrast,
> when I read 'joy tutorials/material', it's just a mass of unrelated  
> floating
> facts, without any unifying goal direction.
>
>> 1. A program generator takes as input an existing program and  
>> returns a
>> small modification of it, such as adding, deleting, or replacing a  
>> single
>> atom or item in a list, etc. ...
>
> I guess where 'joy' comes in, is that the code must remain  
> syntactically
> valid after it's been modified, and joy satisfies this easily - or  
> does it?
> Considering lisp, which consists to nested symbolic-expressions: if  
> you
> replaced any one s-exprn with another, I guess it would remain
> syntactically valid? And I guess that if joy uses concatination  
> instead
> of nesting, then it's even easier to replace pieces/s-exprns?
> The essence is 'what are the "atoms"' like they are the bracketed
> s-exprns in lisp?
>
>> Use this generator to generate a slew of offspring from each of
>> the programs, if any, that made it through fitness testing for the  
>> previous
>> generation.
>
>> 3. Execute each generated program on the test data and measure
>> fitness basedon the results. Save the programs with the highest
>> fitness rating and discard all the rest.
>
> So the complete idea is captured in this 1, 2, 3 description; and the
> rest is merely refinement.  Like "hello world" is a complete stand- 
> alone
> demonstration, and the rest is merely refinement. There's no need to
> hold your breath for 10 pages, hoping to find out what the goal is,
> like when I try to read 'joy material'.

The goal of "Joy material" appears to be to teach the reader the
concepts of Joy via theory and examples. Should there be another?
--
don

> ...

> == Chris Glur.
>
> PS. You will have read
> http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/evolution.html
> http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/rnnevolution.html
> http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/resilientmachines.html
> http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/metalearner.html
> as I recall he modifies/evolves 'forth-li' code.
> The results seem to have been good.
> Right now I can't remember how he 'slices the
> atomic parts of forth-like'.
>
>
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