From: James Gray <james@...>
Date: 2008-03-31T11:43:50+09:00
Subject: Re: Google Summer of Code proposal:  GRuVeR: A General Ruby

On Mar 30, 2008, at 8:37 PM, Nikos Dimitrakopoulos wrote:

>> Please understand this is not a complaint, but as I was reading
>> through the proposal, I found myself wondering about using constraint
>> processing in addition to genetic algorithms.  I'm just mentioning
>> that here so you can factor it into your thinking.  I'm not saying  
>> you
>> should toss your genetic algorithm idea, but it might be a bonus if
>> the system you develop could easily have the planned Charlie-based
>> integration swapped out for a Gecode/R backend (assuming someone was
>> willing to write it, of course):
>>
>> http://gecoder.rubyforge.org/
>
> The truth is that even though I have heard of constraint  
> programming, I
> had never really see what exactly it is. After reading some examples  
> on
> the geocode/r site I must confess I found it at least interesting (if
> not exciting :) ).

Yes, I learned so much just watching that project come together.  One  
big plus of using it is that you can often get great performance out  
of it, if you model the problem well and choose the write strategy to  
solve it with.

> So, after some really quick thinking, I believe that it could be used
> *in conjunction* with the genetic algorithms at least in the first
> place.

This is a neat idea that didn't occur to me.  I have no idea how  
feasible or successful an approach like this would be.

It might be fun to start a discussion about this on the Gecode/R list  
though and see what those folks think:

http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/gecoder-users

Good luck!

James Edward Gray II