From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Fri Sep 15 2000 - 08:40:00 MDT
On Thursday, September 14, 2000 2:00 PM Eugene Leitl
eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de wrote:
> The (pathetic) state of the art is stuff being done by John Koza. You
> can read him up on the web, and in several (by now three) fat MIT
> Press bibles, all titled Genetic Programming (I, II and now III if not
> IV, I believe), where he struts his (some of them actually pretty
> nifty) achievements.
Koza has a list called, of all things, genetic-programming. I used to be on
it, but the traffic was too high -- like this list doesn't have any noise!:)
> The field has huge potential, but is right now stuck imo slightly
> before cyanobacteria stage, for several reasons. Most of them is that
> mature (those having lived through a few iterations) evolutionary
> algorithms are very subtle, not all details of natural instances of
> them are known, and the few Comp. Sci. evolutionary algorithm
> practitioners ignore even what little we already know, standing smack
> middle in da Nile. Sounds a lot like AI, huh?
I agree. From a business perspective, too, the applications are arcane.
Yes, certain forms of genetic programming, such as genetic algorithmns (GA)
have been used in certain areas of engineering design where things are
highly formalizable -- you can create a system of [nonlinear] differential
equations to model, say, propellers blades, then use GA to solve them --
there isn't much else. At least, there's little that someone is building a
viable business plan around. No one, to my knowledge, is using them for,
say, e-commerce or web development.:)
> Another reason is that GP looks like programming straight from the
> Salpetriere to most Comp. Sci. people, unless they are martians. Clash
> of paradigms, very much so.
Good way of putting it. I do think, however, if we stick to areas where
such things as GA work now, we could get a lot from them. Any area where we
have an already formalized system that is nonlinear can be a target. I
would stick to enigineering projects for now, such as the one mentioned
before. Not only are many of these already formalized, BUT they've been so
for a while, so it wouldn't be astounding or controversial to apply GA to
them.
Anyone interested in doing that here? (I've mentioned this on the list
before, in regards to testing the space of cryoprotectants. But this was
about two or three years ago. I think only Anders Sandberg responded.)
> > I'm a bit afraid that the business plan would look something like:
> > 1 - Get lots o money
> > 2 - Spend lots o money doing heaps of cool research into genetic
> > programming, play around with oh so excellent equipment, discover some
> > excellent stuff, have a bloody fantastic time
> > 3 - Run out of money with no products/market to show for it,
> > 4 - get a slapping (eek) from the VC(s)
> > 5 - Reputation in ruins, become a tramp, scavenge in bins, waiting
for
> > the singularity
>
> I dunno about 5 (participating in a .com burnout will raise your job
> market value), but 1-4 is imo exactly how the shit can be expected to
> go down. </old curmugeon>
Except for numbers 3, 4, and 5, this is my battle strategy too.:)
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
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