"Max" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | In GAs, you operate on a Population of solutions. Each Individual from | the Population is a potential solution to the problem you're | optimizing, and Individuals have what's called a chromosome - a | specification of what it contains. For example, common chromosomes are | bit strings, lists of ints/floats, permutations...etc. I'm stuck on | how to implement the different chromosomes. I have a Population class, | which is going to contain a list of Individuals. Each individual will | be of a certain chromosome. I envision the chromosomes as subclasses | of an abstract Individual class, perhaps all in the same module. I'm | just having trouble envisioning how this would be coded at the | population level. Presumably, when a population is created, a | parameter to its __init__ would be the chromosome type, but I don't | know how to take that in Python and use it to specify a certain class. | | I'm doing something similar with my crossover methods, by specifying | them as functions in a module called Crossover, importing that, and | defining | | crossover_function = getattr(Crossover, "%s_crossover" % xover) | | Where xover is a parameter defining the type of crossover to be used. | I'm hoping there's some similar trick to accomplish what I want to do | with chromosomes - or maybe I'm going about this completely the wrong | way, trying to get Python to do something it's not made for. Any help/ | feedback would be wonderful.
'Python genetic algorithm' returns 25000 hits with Google. But here is what I would do without looking at them. Start with the Individual base class and common methods, some virtual (not implemented). An example of a virtual method would be the crossover(self,other) method, since its implementation depends on the concrete chromosome implementation. Make subclasses with concrete chromosome types (initialized in .__init__). For each, implement the methods that depend on that type. In particular, the mutate(self, args) and crossover(self,other, args) methods. For the Population class, give __init__ an 'individual' parameter and store it as an attribute. If you want, check that it 'issubclass(Individual)'. To add members to the population, call the stored subclass. To operate on the population, write Population methods. There should not depend on the particular chromosome implementations. To operate on the members within the Population methods, call their Individual methods. b = a.mutate(args); c = a.crossover(b, args). I see two ways to deal with scoring the fitness of individuals within a Population instance. Once is to write a particular fitness function, pass it to the Population init to save as an attribute, and then call as needed. The other is to subclass an Individual subclass, give it that funtion fitness method, and pass that subsubclass to Population. The difference is between having Population methods calling self.fitness(some_member) versus some_member.fitness(). I hope this is helpful for getting started. Terry Jan Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
