Entries for September 2006
Back from honeymoon
I went quiet for a while because first I was busy getting married, and then abroad for the honeymoon. It was, of course, lovely, but now I'm back at work and getting back into my normal routine.
While not working myself, I set a number of computers to work, and in spite of a few crashes and a dead power supply I do have some useful results from that period. I'll be looking at the data in more detail over the course of this week, but the overall message is that I have found a set of conditions under which learning agents evolve relatively reliably, but they are conditions under which one run takes 5-6 days so I'm pleased but not too pleased....
Following a hunch that my advisor had, I tried increasing the duration of each presentation of food from 20 simulation time steps to 50. This has dramatically improved results, but increasing this parameter by a factor of x also increases the run time for each generation by very nearly x, hence the problem I now face. This is still progress—I have finally demonstrated that the task I'm setting the agents is at least tractable—but for practical purposes I really do need to find ways of speeding this up.