From: Peter Hickman <peterhickman386@...>
Date: 2010-03-29T17:21:32+09:00
Subject: Re: Boid writeup idea

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From what other people have been able to tease out of you you seem to be
talking about mini domain experts.

I had a friend who's Phd was a genetic algorithm that tried to produce
optimal wiring for electronic circuits. The GA would spit out a design and a
host of experts would tweak the output. Each expert knew only one or two
things, most only knew one thing. One would, for example, know that wires
couldn't be too close to each other or they would start to interfere.
Another would try and shorten wires to reduce power loss, another would try
and space things out to avoid overheating.

Each mini expert would modify and score the design. In effect they became
the fitness function for the GA. It was largely a blackboard system, the GA
threw the initial data onto the blackboard and the experts adjusted it until
either they cycled or no one could find anything else to do. Then it went
back to the GA.

And yes, such systems were used to design trading algorithms and the like.
But the financial industry was somewhat cautious about placing their faith
in randomly generated algorithms.

All this technology was old when I studied it 20 years ago. "Swarm
intelligence" just sounds like a rebranding of much older technology, or
perhaps it simply demonstrates that someone has not been bothered to do the
research.

Thunk, you need to tighten up your writing / thinking. If I took a red pen
to your emails most would be reduced to only a single paragraph, the rest
would be blank. If you want help or to make people interested in your work
then you need to put some effort into communication. The signal to noise
ratio is too low.

Sorry for being blunt but you are in danger of taking on Arthur T Murray's
mantel ( http://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html for those old enough
to remember is contribution to AI )

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