Re: Interfacing GALib to Swarm

[John W. Fondon III (Trey]

>To anyone with interest:

(That would be me :)...

>        Having done some programming research, I believe one good way to  do
>this is to use a named pipe of fifo to pass data back and forth between
>the two processes.  GALib would initialize and pass, one at a time, the
>chromosomes to a swarm simulation for evaluation.  The swarm simulation
>would run the simulation and pass back a fitness score.  GALib would
>then evolve successive generations and pass more chromosomes to the
>swarm simualation.  It would be nice to have some control over the GA
>parameters from swarm and to have some visualization aids.  I belive all
>of this is possible, but perhaps difficult.
>        Because I am far from an expert programmer, I am posting this message
>to see if anyone knows of a better approach, or something that may
>improve this approach.  Any comments would be appreciated.  I hate to go
>blindly into a bad idea, but it wouldn't be the first time.
>
>Rob Kewley
>

Hi Rob,
        This is very similar to what I am planning on doing -  though not
nec. with GALib.


                   ____________________________
                  |  Server (GA, GUI, SWARM)   |   Server would house GA
send out jobs
                   ____________________________   (parameters) and accept
id and fitness.
    ______________|   |    |    |    |    |   |________________
    |                 |    |    |    |    |                    |
   PC                PC   PC   PC    PC   PC                  other servers
All PC's will run SWARM and the fitness evaluation code.

The PC's (or other machines on the network) will execute the the CA
programs and evaluate the fitness of the parameter set sent to it by the
GA/server.  THe nature of the data being operated upon by the GA will be
transparent to it, similarly, SWARM doesn't care where the parameters come
from, so I don't see the need for an "interface".  If the GA and SWARM can
be executed automatically, then a simple Perl script should suffice as an
'interface' (network complications notwithstanding).

BTW, this reminds me of a question I have that is not (exactly) related:
What is the minimal system upon which SWARM can be executed?
I'm planning on stacking up cheap pentium motherboards, sharing a single
disk, monitor, etc.
Is this feasible?

Trey


John W. Fondon III (Trey)
t.u. Southwestern Medical Center
Dallas, TX
address@hidden
address@hidden




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