I didn't really describe what I've been working on in my original email, so
I'll contribute that to this thread to keep it rolling.
well no... because we all already knew about the accident with the monkies...
Who would have thought that monkey blood isn't compatible with human
blood? I thought for sure the experiment would have worked.
For the past few months I've been working on the design of a recurrent
neural network for use in signaling formation changes in groups of robots.
The project is focused on machine learning, but I've naively tied it to
robotics so it appears to be related to my research :) What I specifically
want to do is generate neural networks with a genetic algorithm, and
evaluate their performance by looking directly at the structure of the
neural network rather than its output values.
what do you mean by "formation changes?"
Imagine a hallway that grows more narrow as you walk down it. Now assume
that you have a group of robots that can travel in, and change,
formations. The goal is to traverse the hallway with as many robots
abreast as possible. I want to use a neural network as a signalling
mechanism for changing formations.
why would you want to evaluate the structure of the network rather than the
output values, isn't the whole point to use the GA to generate some structure
that's too complicated/non-obvious to have preconveived that outputs the
desired solution? what's the point of having a fancy network that doesn't
produce anything?
I want to analyze the structure of the network because I'd like a code
base that is capable of that. It could be used later for pruning
networks, producing statistical info about the structure, and maybe some
other stuff... *heheh*.
Your GA comment is correct.
The network itself may not produce anything, but the network analysis
software will. What I'm analyzing the networks for is a packet of
activity in the neurons - a state. I could then map this state to
something useful. Unfortunately, the runtime of the analysis tool will
probably be pretty bad... so I'm not sure what good that will do.
what tools are you using for your GP stuff? lisp? :-) are you reading koza's
books? :-)
Not Lisp, although I'm intereted in persuing it. I'm using the Pygene
library... I know it's slow... I'll look at mosquito and CL over the
break.
http://www.freenet.org.nz/python/pygene/
I've not read Koza's books yet, but I have watched one of his videos on
genetic programming. It was... dry... and... uhhh... it was a freaking
movie on genetic programming! Cool stuff though.
I'm integrating multi-hop routing algorithms with 802.11a/b/g equipment to
produce wireless meshes. I'm then then building a robust communication
mechanism based on the publish/subscribe paradigm on top of the meshes.
It's a big project, and will take quite a while to complete.
is this an exercise in design or implimentation?
Implementation. None of the technology is new. In fact, most of the
algorithms have already cropped up in robotics. Unfortunately, there
aren't codebases to pull from for the application layer protocols, so I'll
have to roll all of it myself.
hrm, well, cool... back to homework I guess...
Damned homework! I can't wait for it to stop!
- Sebastian
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