What are good examples of genetic algorithms/genetic programming solutions? [closed]

Answer 1

There was an competition on codechef.com (great site by the way, monthly programming competitions) where one was supposed to solve an unsolveable sudoku (one should come as close as possible with as few wrong collumns/rows/etc as possible).

What I would do, was to first generate a perfect sudoku and then override the fields, that have been given. From this pretty good basis on I used genetic programming to improve my solution.

I couldn't think of a deterministic approach in this case, because the sudoku was 300x300 and search would've taken too long.

Answer 2

In a seminar in the school, we develop an application to generate music based in the musical mode. The program was build in Java and the output was a midi file with the song. We using distincts aproachs of GA to generate the music. I think this program can be useful to explore new compositions.

Answer 3

It was a while ago, but I rolled a GA to evolve what were in effect image processing kernels to remove cosmic ray traces from Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images. The standard approach is to take multiple exposures with the Hubble and keep only the stuff that is the same in all the images. Since HST time is so valuable, I'm an astronomy buff, and had recently attended the Congress on Evolutionary Computation, I thought about using a GA to clean up single exposures.

The individuals were in the form of trees that took a 3x3 pixel area as input, performed some calculations, and produced a decision about whether and how to modify the center pixel. Fitness was judged by comparing the output with an image cleaned up in the traditional way (i.e. stacking exposures).

It actually sort of worked, but not well enough to warrant foregoing the original approach. If I hadn't been time-constrained by my thesis, I might have expanded the genetic parts bin available to the algorithm. I'm pretty sure I could have improved it significantly.

Libraries used: If I recall correctly, IRAF and cfitsio for astronomical image data processing and I/O.

Answer 4

I made a complete GA framework named "GALAB", to solve many problems:

• locating GSM ANTs (BTS) to decrease overlap & blank locations.
• Resource constraint project scheduling.
• Evolutionary picture creation. (Evopic)
• Travelling salesman problem.
• N-Queen & N-Color problems.
• Knight's tour & Knapsack problems.
• Magic square & Sudoku puzzles.
• string compression, based on Superstring problem.
• 2D Packaging problem.
• Tiny artificial life APP.
• Rubik puzzle.

Answer 5

I used genetic algorithms (as well as some related techniques) to determine the best settings for a risk management system that tried to keep gold farmers from using stolen credit cards to pay for MMOs. The system would take in several thousand transactions with "known" values (fraud or not) and figure out what the best combination of settings was to properly identify the fraudulent transactions without having too many false positives.

We had data on several dozen (boolean) characteristics of a transaction, each of which was given a value and totalled up. If the total was higher than a threshold, the transaction was fraud. The GA would create a large number of random sets of values, evaluate them against a corpus of known data, select the ones that scored the best (on both fraud detection and limiting the number of false positives), then cross breed the best few from each generation to produce a new generation of candidates. After a certain number of generations the best scoring set of values was deemed the winner.

Creating the corpus of known data to test against was the Achilles' heel of the system. If you waited for chargebacks, you were several months behind when trying to respond to the fraudsters, so someone would have to manually review large numbers of transactions to build up that corpus of data without having to wait too long.

This ended up identifying the vast majority of the fraud that came in, but couldn't quite get it below 1% on the most fraud-prone items (given that 90% of incoming transactions could be fraud, that was doing pretty well).

I did all this using perl. One run of the software on a fairly old linux box would take 1-2 hours to run (20 minutes to load data over a WAN link, the rest of the time spent crunching). The size of any given generation was limited by available RAM. I'd run it over and over with slight changes to the parameters, looking for an especially good result set.

All in all it avoided some of the gaffes that came with manually trying to tweak the relative values of dozens of fraud indicators, and consistently came up with better solutions than I could create by hand. AFAIK, it's still in use (about 3 years after I wrote it).

Answer 6

I made a little critters that lived in this little world. They had a neural network brain which received some inputs from the world and the output was a vector for movement among other actions. Their brains were the "genes".

The program started with a random population of critters with random brains. The inputs and output neurons were static but what was in between was not.

The environment contained food and dangers. Food increased energy and when you have enough energy, you can mate. The dangers would reduce energy and if energy was 0, they died.

Eventually the creatures evolved to move around the world and find food and avoid the dangers.

I then decided to do a little experiment. I gave the creature brains an output neuron called "mouth" and an input neuron called "ear". Started over and was surprised to find that they evolved to maximize the space and each respective creature would stay in its respective part (food was placed randomly). They learned to cooperate with each other and not get in each others way. There were always the exceptions.

Then i tried something interesting. I dead creatures would become food. Try to guess what happened! Two types of creatures evolved, ones that attacked like in swarms, and ones that were high avoidance.

So what is the lesson here? Communication means cooperation. As soon as you introduce an element where hurting another means you gain something, then cooperation is destroyed.

I wonder how this reflects on the system of free markets and capitalism. I mean, if businesses can hurt their competition and get away with it, then its clear they will do everything in their power to hurt the competition.

Edit:

I wrote it in C++ using no frameworks. Wrote my own neural net and GA code. Eric, thank you for saying it is plausible. People usually don't believe in the powers of GA (although the limitations are obvious) until they played with it. GA is simple but not simplistic.

For the doubters, neural nets have been proven to be able to simulate any function if they have more than one layer. GA is a pretty simple way to navigate a solution space finding local and potentially global minimum. Combine GA with neural nets and you have a pretty good way to find functions that find approximate solutions for generic problems. Because we are using neural nets, then we are optimizing the function for some inputs, not some inputs to a function as others are using GA

Here is the demo code for the survival example: http://www.mempko.com/darcs/neural/demos/eaters/ Build instructions:

• Install darcs, libboost, liballegro, gcc, cmake, make
• darcs clone --lazy http://www.mempko.com/darcs/neural/
• cd neural
• cmake .
• make
• cd demos/eaters
• ./eaters