On 04/24/2010 02:36 PM, Adam Katz wrote: > The ruleqa system is very slow to crunch its results [...] As to the > nightly runs, while a code revamp might help, it's typically easier > to throw more hardware at it.
Hm. Digging through the repository brought forth some of the conversations I had at the MIT Spam Conference this year between some Cisco (IronPort) developers working there under Henry Stern. Specifically, I was being challenged with the differences between SA's genetic algorithm and perceptrons, which is beyond my current mathematical prowess. Upon talking to my girlfriend (who knows far more about these things than myself), we concluded that since the Cisco group was specialized in perceptrons, they likely suffered from the "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem and that it was probably a negligible gain not worth the needed rewriting. Today, I saw this in svn at masses/README.perceptron: > The advantage of this program over that of the genetic algorithm > (GA) implementation in spamassassin/masses/craig_evolve.c is that > while the GA requires several hours to run on high-end machines, the > perceptron requires only about 15 seconds of CPU time on an Athlon XP > 1700+ system. Written by Henry Stern, 2004-01-08. If I recall from my conversation with him last month, he abandoned the project and his PhD pursuit when offered a job at IronPort. Henry: I've Bcc'd you in case you're not on the dev list anymore. Apologies if you get this twice.
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