Entries in "weekly update"
February 16, 2007
Learning how to use some new tools
Most of what I have accomplished in the past two weeks amounts to learning how to use the BN/PBN toolbox, and re-learning how to use Matlab. In a sense it's a bit frustrating—all this time not actually progressing in research—but it's also clearly necessary to do this sometimes.
The experiment replication I had almost finished with yesterday is now up and running, and replicates the published results very neatly. It turns out that my error wasn't in the code itself, but a simple typo in the input matrix.... I've also discovered that there is an existing function in the toolbox to do essentially the same thing as my code, which makes me feel a tad foolish, but really the point of the exercise was to learn the tools, so it wasn't entirely wasted effort. I was going to try and do the same thing in C++, but I feel like now that I'm over the hump of working out how to use it, the BN/PBN toolbox saves so much wheel-reinvention that it's just foolish not to use it, so unless I can find a C/C++ library to do the same sort of thing I'll stick to what I know.
This means I'm ready to start doing some 'real' work next week, and I'll sketch out one idea for this work behind the cut.
Continue reading "Learning how to use some new tools"
February 09, 2007
Incremental progress
I didn't get quite as much done this week as I was hoping, because I underestimated the speed difference between working in an environment I'm used to (C++ with header files I've been using for 3 years) and one I'm not (Matlab with a toolbox I first looked at last week). I'm not unhappy with my progress, all told, but I was being a little overoptimistic when I set my goals for this week. Both the literature survey and the GRN model are under way, and I do at least feel like I know what I'm doing with both now. It's just going to take me another day or two till I have anything to show for that.
February 02, 2007
Reading and more reading
I'm going to revive the weekly updates because I find that having to report on my progress, even if only to myself, helps me keep focussed. Over the next couple of weeks I should be putting together something like a roadmap, and then I can start to compare progress to the plan, but until then it's still useful to make myself sit down and say this is how much I got done in 5 days
. I'll probably make a habit of writing these on Friday afternoons, because it ought to [in a good week at least] be a nice way to close the working week.
Continue reading "Reading and more reading"
March 10, 2006
More working agents
This week I only have fairly general things to say, but what I do have is encouraging.
Since last updating, I've focussed more on looking at the most recent runs as a group than on going into great detail on any one individual. This means that I don't have answers to the questions I was asking last week about why the individual agent I had singled out behaves quite as it does, but I have been able to find out that this agent is not quite as rare as I initially thought, which is quite reassuring really.
Continue reading "More working agents"
February 21, 2006
Catching up
I'm in a hurry because I'm going on holiday tomorrow, it's past midnight, and I've only just finished tying up some loose ends and setting a large number of experiments running on various computers, so I'm just going to copy-and-paste the update I sent to my lab recently.
Continue reading "Catching up"
February 02, 2006
More interneurons, shaping experiments, sensory input
Nothing dramatic to report this week, but things are ticking over. Here's a summary of what I've been up to:
Continue reading "More interneurons, shaping experiments, sensory input"
January 24, 2006
It's called research because you have to RE search
The past week in brief:
1-4 my to-do list from last week, of which I got as far as #3
5 Experiments I re-ran with fixed code, because the bug I mentioned last week about turned out to have a large effect on results (everything from the last couple of weeks; not all have finished yet).
6 Experiments running right now (testing out a simple shaping algorithm; trying larger numbers of interneurons)
7 Experiments I want to run soon (intermediate numbers of interneurons)
8 Programming to do (sensory flags; co-evolution?)
Continue reading "It's called research because you have to RE search"
January 18, 2006
Incremental progress
I'm moving towards making the weekly updates a somewhat less detailed overview, overlapping with the more detailed ramblings I write more frequently but on no regular schedule. This week's is behind the cut.
Continue reading "Incremental progress"
January 13, 2006
This week
Here is the update I wrote on Wednesday. Last week's update may be useful for context:
I have quite a lot to say this week, and for some of it I haven't yet sorted out the wood from the trees, so I'm going to try and break it down into useful sections, and put a summary up here. You may only want to read the summary, but the detail's there if you want it:
- I finished analysing the agent I described last week, and several similar ones. They are not very good, but I learned some useful things from them; mainly that my searches are often getting stuck in a local optimum, and that there is a source of noise I hadn't accounted for in the environment.
- A better agent: though I still haven't found one that does the phase locking I was hoping for, I've found one that behaves in a more useful reactive way, so it robustly does well. This is a bit of a mixed blessing, because the existence of a reactive strategy that works well probably makes it a lot less likely that a learning strategy will emerge.
- Programming done/to do: old bug fixed, a new one found & fixed, trying another way to generate the trials.
- Data to analyse: the experiments in which the agent does actually die when fitness reaches 0 are finished
- New experiments to run: ones in which non-optimal agents are saved correctly, so I can see whether anything interesting happens between the best agent being found and the end of the run.
- Next steps: maybe time to close off the temporal-correlation avenue and start looking at runs with useful sensory input?
Last week's update
What follows is edited from the status email I sent my lab last Thursday. It seems like as good a starting point as any for my weekly updates.