Hi
I consider myself a pretty good imperative programmer, been at it for decades, and am tryibng my hand at Haskell now. Unfrituantly I am not "getting" it all that quickly despite having the multimedia haskell book.
To start ghetting some hands on, I thought iI owuld do something which i have done many times before in imperatives, a basic Genetic Algorithm Library. Unfortunatly I am comming unstuck straight away and was hoping some of you kind folk could point in the direction of dry land :-)
iIf your not familiar with GAs its not too important, simply a GA searches over the whole solution space randomly. Well not quiet, its a guided search, its guided by evolution ie by the fitness of each indicidual of a random initial population. Evolution is simulated by 3 basic operators, selection, cross over and mutation. selection is which indiviuals get to breed, cross over is how they breed, and mutation is just things intetresting.
So after reading the multimedia book, Iimmediately thought of a defining the solution space as a infinite list. I was hoping then I could do things like take 5 gaSolutionSpace to get 5 iterations or generations. My first attempt tied to use lis syntax [], but it wouldnt compile and after seeing "numsFrom" ina tutorial I redefined it as such. Here is what I have so far:
-- gaSolutionSpace :: [a] -> [a]
-- gaSolutionSpace [] = gaSolutionSpace createRandomPopulation -- recursive base case
gaSolutionSpace x = x : gaSolutionSpace (evolvepopulation x)
evolvepopulation :: a -> a evolvepopulation p = mutate cross select p
-- createRandomPopulation :: [Num a] createRandomPopulation = [1,23,4,5,6]
cross p = p mutate p = p select p = p
---- The take operator doesnt work on this. from hugs:
HAGA> take 5 gaSolutionSpace [1,2,3,4,5] ERROR - Type error in application *** Expression : take 5 gaSolutionSpace [1,2,3,4,5] *** Term : take *** Type : Int -> [e] -> [e] *** Does not match : a -> b -> c -> d
I am not sure I follow this. I assume its cause I didnt use the list notation in definaing gaSolutionSpace. Any ideas on how to do that. ? What about using map. It occurs to me that you can define gaSolutionspace as a map of the evolvolepopuloation function acrossan infinite solution space, but I dont know how to makethis infinte list to map over ...?
There ar 2 papaers on GAs in haskell, but they use monads. I realise for performance I will probably have to use them too, but for now I would liek to do it without mondas even if performance isnt optimal.
Sorry again for the newbie questions, but any help is appreciated.
Stephen
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