Re: Just starting out.. newbie help :)

Gustaf Bjorksten wrote:
> I think y'all missing the point. The original premise that "perl is not
> fast enough _for_AI_" is incorrect IMHO. This is not about raw execution
> speed! Perl is ace for modelling sh!t and definately has a place in my
> AI hacking toolkit. I don't give a damn if it aint the bleedingest
> lightningest-fast thing on two bits

Unfortunately, most AI-related algorithms are
computationally intense; execution speed *does*
end up being critical.  For example, I tried using
perl to do some genetic algorithms stuff:

> On Sun, 31 Dec 2000 12:46:00 -0500,
> in <[email protected]>
> John Porter wrote:
> > 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.

Undoubtedly some of you are going to argue that my "mistake"
was using OO in perl.  But as I said, "To do a GA/GP system
really requires OO", and I stand firmly by that remark.

-- 
John Porter