Present

Lee, Tom, Bill, Omri (scribe), Kwaku, Jake, George

Grants, collaborations, visits

We have funding for collaborative projects aiming at human-competitive GP with Moshe Sipper (and his group) over at Ben-Gurion University. The funding alots for travel expenses for quite a few round trips to Israel. We should keep this opportunity in mind.

Lee will also be applying for Templeton funding for looking at “big” questions about life and its origins. Ventpods may come into play here.

Chris and Conner will be coming to visit sometime in the upcoming weeks. They will join for a research group meeting, and Lee may also try to set up a time and place for them to give a talk.

Status updates and such

Tom’s been working with the coin problem, and clojush doesn’t require anything beyond integer instructions to find a solution. So, it may not be quite the right problem for trying to get at “replacing the programmer”. Either way, now it’s an example problem in clojush.

Tom has also done some tests with “bagging” (ensemble voting) and it doesn’t look promising.

Jake’s been working on brevis with Kyle, and there will be a demo next week!

Omri has been looking into SIMD integer factorization algorithms.

Lee has been doing experimenting with “bushy” or “deep” program generation, and also experimenting with increasing no-op usage in the calculator problem.

Possible threads to follow

Evolving SIMD parallel algorithms.

Analyzing why no-ops seem to help the evolutionary dynamics in the calculator problem. More generally, considering experiments with adaptive representations.

Generating random code shapes.

Linear Push, some ideas for how to maintain recursion and expressive “chunking of stuff”:

• instructions with “baked-in” arguments
• instructions with structural taken from the stack like regular arguments
• some instructions scan for keywords like “end”
• some instructions scan for patterns
• make the execution environment dense with tags
• revisit tag space machines
• incorporate GOTOs
• recursion through environments

New ways to deal with parentheses and mutation in ULTRA:

• no mutation
• no mutation of parentheses (including no ability for things to mutate into parentheses)

Reading for next week

Maarten Keijzer’s Push-forth paper.

Library of Babel by Borges.