Posted on 11/15/2005 8:25:44 AM PST by balrog666
Just a minor clarification, which is largely irrelevant and you didn't really make any mistake, but I like to hear myself type..
Genetic Algorithms don't produce program code. An individual in a genetic algorithm is represented as a string of "genes" that encode its phenotype. The result of a GA is the most optimal string representation found. So GA's are closest to natural evolution, which is why I find them more interesting than Genetic Programming, which does use computer programs as a representation. So in Genetic Prgoramming an individual is represented as a prgram and the actual program is mutated and evaluated for the selection process. In this case the output will be the most optimal program found.
GP's are not GA's - they are both different applications of evolutionary computation.
You could have asked Magellan's crew, or the confederate soldiers wintering at Fredericksburg (1862-63) or Petersburg (1864-65), or any else who's ever had scurvy about that.
Hmm... Could it be they just didn't have a proper nutritional diet?
You can also die if you don't eat. Is that also a 'broken' gene?
It's amazing the arrogance of some...
My cat wouldn't eat fruit on a bet. Once in a blue moon he'll eat some leafy stuff just to throw up. Even as do cats and dogs, we have a gene for making vitamin C so that we don't have to eat it. But ours is broken.
Thus your response is so far inadequate. You are refusing to see the problem so you don't have to answer it. That doesn't look very convincing to anyone who has already seen the problem for himself and was waiting for a real answer.
It's amazing the powers some attribute to willful ignorance.
I'm told the "goto" statement still exists in C++, but that it hasn't actually been observed.
C++ compilers will compile C statements and there is a "goto" in C.
Not if you want to keep your job.
C is the only thing in the computer world that I truly loved without reservation.
Humanity.. Apes on Drugs.. Wow.. What a concept..
DDLE seems to be a work in progress. I'm not thrilled with the interface. I predict it will go through some evolution.
You've obviously never lived in a town where The Grateful Dead played in concert.
It was the reverse polish notation that did it..
( Not any sort of a statement on Garcia, just that it took me a long time to appreciate their musical stylings.. )
That's okay. I'm just trying to keep ahead of the curve.
My rule of thumb was, if you couldn't see the entire function on one screen, it was time to break it up. Obviously switch statements couldn't always follow this rule, but I loathed deeply nested conditionals.
I never used a goto.
I didn't learn about the "goto" statement until my last week of C++ when one of the students mentioned he had come across it in an online tutorial. The instructor acknowledged it could be used, but then told us he'd flunk anyone in the class who included it in his coding. Evidently "goto" is a four-letter word in the programming world...
I did, all the time. It was in my Apple II days, using Apple BASIC. I was young and foolish, and I thought GOTO and GOSUB were wonderful. Now, listening to you guys, I wonder where I went wrong.
The results of the two methods of producing programs are *vastly* different in character and structure, and any programmer could tell at a glance whether a particular program was actually written by a human, or "grown/evolved" via genetic algorithms.
And one can often tell at a glance that 'a particular program was actually written by' an idiot.
It's an unnecessary construct in C. I got into VB and found that onerror goto statements were common.
If you caused an exception in C you were hosed without hope of redemption. I really loved the discipline of managing everything. You never had to worry about buffer overflows because you never allowed them. After a while the coding conventions were automatic.
I once spent a couple weeks writing a regular expression parser as a single recursive function. I did it entirely with pointers. Not a single memory allocation in sight.
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