Present: Lee, Tom, Nic, Lance, Mike, Tim, Bill, Kwaku (virtual), Karthik (virtual)

Tom’s Benchmarks

He’d gladly have help coding and doing experiments on program synthesis benchmark problems.

Clojush 2

Clojush 2 is now live. It adds a linear representation for genomes, which is translated into regular Push programs for execution. People should try it out and report bugs!

Documentation of Recent Push

Mike (and Nic) will be working on documenting the use of Push as they get to know it.

Bladder Cancer Data Set

Clojush 2 has the training error down near 70. Lee hasn’t figured out how to control overfitting yet.

Discussion of Paper: Evolving Neural Networks That Are Both Modular and Regular: HyperNeat Plus the Connection Cost Technique Categories and Subject Descriptors

• There are different kinds of modularity, and what we want is different from what they present.
• Evolving an interface for functions is hard!
  • Push environments might be helpful here.
• Varying the “environment” of the problem might help.
  • Lexicase is sort of like varying the environment. Maybe?
• It seems like it would be reasonable to add a test case that tries to improve modularity based on the compressibility of the program.
  • We’d likely be interested in minimizing the amount a program is compressed. Something like: (compressed size of program)/(uncompressed size of program)

Present: Lee, Tom, Karthik (scribe), Mike, Bill (hangouts)

Prime agenda item’s :-
Tom’s proposal defense practice.
Clojush 2.0

Administrative stuff :
– More students, yay!
– Faculty guests over the semester : Nic McPhee, Lance Williams
– Meeting next week : 10-12 on 27th
– Lee’s presentation at the BEACON center, on a bunch of topics, ranging from the GPTP work to some ALIFE work

Collaboration with Jason Moore:

• Lexicase selection might potentially be super useful for those kinds of problems.
• Some of the data is non binary.
• PushGP runs in progress.
• Potential for more people to start doing some runs on this dataset!

Clojush 2.0

• ULTRA padding issues sorted out. (Padding removed in the new Clojush)
• wc slightly better, factorial slightly worse on initial tests.
• Representation for the genome is a linear sequence that can be converted into a Push program for execution.
• Epigenetic switching of instructions is easier with a linear genome.
• Possible release this weekend.

Tom’s proposal defense practice:

• Start time 11.02AM
• Prime focus of proposal being Lexicase selection, which is novel in multiple ways in the domain of software synthesis using Genetic Programming.
• End time 11.49 AM ( Overall roughly 45min)

Present: Lee, Tom (scribe), Tim

NO MEETING NEXT WEEK!

For the following week: Read the paper Evolving Neural Networks That Are Both Modular and Regular: HyperNeat Plus the Connection Cost Technique Categories and Subject Descriptors, which will be sent to the email list by Tom.

Dartmouth Trip

• Lee touted lexicase as potentially good for their work
• We got a bladder cancer data set to try things with.
• Lee did some initial hackings, starting with simple trees, and is now trying Clojush
• Tim will be working on this.

WC + Tags

No difference between tags and no tags 🙁

Plush

It could be that instructions are no-oping near the beginning of programs, either because of a bug or just because the required stacks are empty. We could track the number of no-oping instructions to see if it increases throughout a run. It could be interesting to see what percent of instructions noop at each program position during each generation — you could have generations on the x-axis and program positions on the y-axis, and a heatmap showing what percent of instructions noop.