Re: Just starting out.. newbie help :)

You should talk to Kevin Lenzo over a CMU. One of the projects he's worked
on is written mostly in Perl I believe and it works much better than most
other AI voice apps.

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Porter" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2001 10:25 AM
Subject: 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
>
>