Lab meeting notes 15 October 2014

Present: Lee, Lance, Karthik(Scribe), Ben, Tim, Mike

The pucks environment. 

– Testing of the neighbor finding algorithm.

– Scale up the world and check for the efficiency of the newer neighbor finding algorithm.

– Add a potential scaling factor setting?

– Building more worlds that are somewhere in between completely random and completely deterministic.

Clojush documentation – outstanding issue for a very long term. 

– Evolving things with say, 3 inputs.

– Use a Wiki for documentation.

– Handling documentation for things that are highly dynamic.

– Talk about environments, either today/sometime soon

– Tim’s decision tree results: Current success rate ~62%, which isn’t necessarily better than just guessing “no” on the problem.

– Parameters that can potentially improve generalization?

Uncle Bob piece. 

(Long term) : Presentation on Satisfiability Modulo Theory, constraints, etc.

Present: Lee, Tom, Bill, Tim, Karthik (scribe), Mike, Beryl, Wren, Satyajeet, Frode (Hangouts)

Overview of domains people think they’re working on during the semester:

Wren: Calcium dynamics of pollen tubes. First tasks once the relevant data is here – inferring an equation from the data?

Beryl: Currently interested in the Quantum Computing domain. Some references of work to build on -> ( https://github.com/omribernstein/qgame

https://github.com/knod/qromp )

Mike: Interested in analytics of crime data. Data acquisition might be significantly non-trivial. Potential collaborations with CSSI at UMass? ( http://www.cssi.umass.edu/ ) ? {Also lookup http://thesunrisefoundation.org/ for potentially interesting data for work along these lines. }

Karthik: Focus this semester -> Semantic-Code Search integrated with an EC system, Lexicase-GSX, Human-Readable GP

Tim: Classifier for a bladder cancer problem. First classifier – Weka C4.5?

Bill: Epigenetic layering tests. Intention to test the system beyond hand-picked problems.

Tom: ( Lexicase selection paper accepted to the IEEE transactions on evolutionary computation. ) Benchmark problems for GP. Improvements to Clojush.

Frode: Clojush simplification during a run as a genetic operator.

Present: Lee, Tom, Tim, Karthik (scribe), Lance, Mike, Wren, Beryl, Bill

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, Bill, Karthik(Scribe), Tim

Administrative stuff : GECCO next week, Frode’s presentation got moved to the first session/first talk.

Clojush 2.0 : 
Clojush 2.0 nearing release – Mixed results so far on different problems in terms of success rate on different problems, but this is not the current priority – the idea’s that going to a linear genome allows for greater capabilities that can be subsequently explored.
Clojush 2.0 is *NOT* backwards compatible – the “Plush” genome is what’s manipulated to eventually generate a Push program.
Close-paren probabilities come from a binomial distribution. Modify/tweak this for it to get slightly better before full release ?
– Availability of Hill Climbing genetic operators on Plush.
– Selection *mid-generation* ? + Not use reversion/ use it “reasonably” ?
– Experiments on potential reversion.
– Lein deploy : long term thing to do, but not a priority.

Tom’s GECCO talk practice :- 
– The overall idea of using GP for “traditional” programming problems.
– Some details on Lexicase selection.
– Minor details on Push, since code is evolved in Push.
– The ULTRA genetic operator.
– The idea of achieving *perfect* solutions, at least with respect to both the training data and the unseen test data.

To-Do’s :

– Send Lee details on plans for next week(s), since we won’t be meeting next week thanks to GECCO.

– Talk about the meeting with Jason Moore in the next meeting.

CI-lab meeting 04/09/2014

Present : Karthik (scribe), Omri, Bill, Tom, Lee, Jake, Kwaku (Hangouts)

Omri : Working on Div III : Website with quantum computer simulator/visualizer. Immediate next task : Circuit diagram component.
Managed to calculate tangle finally.

Jake : Div III stuff – working on rendering issues.

Brevis not scaling well enough? Rotation math/confusing stuff – so evolve this instead.

The long term issue on producing GP results that are “human-understandable”/interesting issues on protected division ending up with a no-op.

Generative tests, etc – to potentially solve generalization problems. Generalization is still a problem to solve. Validation within runs. Tom’s training/test split.

Co-evolutionary geography.
Spatial co-evolution – Quicker, Fitter and Less bloated
https://www.lri.fr/~hansen/proceedings/2012/GECCO/proceedings/p759.pdf

Lecture meeting/seminar – April 29th/5pm –
http://www-unix.ecs.umass.edu/~gong/
Potential resonance with Monte-Carlo tree search.

Why Turing machines and “Go” aren’t equivalent in power :
http://www.researchgate.net/post/Can_we_simulate_a_Universal_Turing_Machine_using_the_game_of_Go

Bill – code overhaul/changed instruction set. Some changes in the hill climber, etc.
Wind turbine stuff – target being human competitive.

Tom – Working on the Lexicase paper. /Article revision.

Frode – Simplification paper/poster for GECCO. Looking at journals where this might be a good fit.

GPTP :
Travel etc.

Clojush : eval push limit
Other things on Clojush/Java integration :
– Potentially introduce a new Push instruction
– Asynchronous timeout to prevent instructions that take arbitrarily long.