Present

Lee, Tom, Frode, Kwaku, Karthik, Eddie, Omri (scribe)

Reminders

Lee: send out a CI Lab email about Zeke’s webgp thing

GECCO deadlines: Jan. 15th for abstracts, 29th for papers, and they seem very serious about sticking to these deadlines

Administrative stuff

There will probably be a meeting next Wednesday, regular time, last of the semester

Proposed Clojush changes

All println calls to prn

Option to report percent of parens in a given program or population

Separate out “report-best”, so that it can be independent from “fitness”

Pysh

It works (yay!)

Some of the syntax is different

Next steps are to include tags and/or any kind of genetic programming functionality

Lee recommends aiming to make it usable for next semester’s Genetic Programming students

Clojush documentation

Frode has been working on this, with a lot of good documentation and tutorials that can be seen in the Clojush wiki

Lee is unsure where we should go from here: where to host documentation and tutorials of Clojush and/or of Push in general

Evolving GUIs and “reactive” Push REPL

Frode has been thinking about doing experiments related to both of these

Lee pointed out that these are separable projects, and that one possible off-shoot is to look into some Excel/Clojush integration

Parameter tweaking in evolutionary runs

Bill has been trying to solve a harmonic oscillation problem

He has a number of interesting non-standard genetic operators that he’s been working with, and is having difficulty knowing/finding the right parameters

Lee suggested taking a step back and trying more standard genetic operators, and also just “seeing what works”

Modules

Karthik would like to do some experiments here, possibly related to the calculator problem

Lee described a lot of recent efforts around automatic modularity, and the various issues surrounding modularity in general

Kwaku has been working on identifying modularity at run-time, hoping to find good metrics for modularity in arbitrary programs (which reminds Lee of some old experiments testing the “compressibility” of execution traces in Push programs)

Word count problem

Thom thinks he’s recently come upon some general solutions to the word count problem (yay!)

Training cases and test cases

Tom’s using training AND test cases, where training cases are seen during evolution, and test cases are only used to test the generality of solutions that arise from the evolutionary loop

Lee has a sort of rotating-auto-generation training case thing, but notes that he doesn’t know what’s going on between generations because of the set of cases shifting under his feet

Tom suggests making one large auto-generated list of cases, choosing a random subset for evolutionary selection, and using the whole thing for comparing different generations

Non-elite lexicase

Lexicase seems to have issues with errors measured in floating point, because selection here will be too elite

So Tom has been experimenting with a non-elite lexicase based on relative ranking (“ranked lexicase”): notably, on the bioavailability problem, it was better than normal lexicase, but equal to standard tournament selection

qgame

There is now a working qgame API, and a GUI in the works