Re: Genetic base classes

Alex Gough wrote:
> If anyone has any feedback, or if I'm barking up an already grown tree, it'd
> be nice to hear.

I'd like to say a little something from my own experience with doing GA/GP
in Perl:  Don't.  That is, unless you're just doing it for fun, to see
how it might look if written in Perl.  If you're expecting to evolve (:-)
a useful, production-quality system, think hard about your performance
requirements.  To do a GA/GP system really requires OO, I think, and OO
in perl is bloody slow.  I wrote a little OO-based GP testbed, with a
total class hierarchy size of less than a dozen classes, and it was still
a good two orders of magnitude slower than the full-blown Java-based
system I've been using, ECJ, which contains like hundreds of classes.
And that's Java.  There are C++-based systems which are undoubtedly
even faster.  As you know, if you've done any GA/GP research, performce
is critical because you'd like to run large populations for many
generations, and in GP particularly, the time to evaluate an individual
grows like exponentially in the number of generations, unless you have
some kind of advanced aggressive size control.

-- 
John Porter

What would Gabrielle do?