Re: evolutionary programming & Lua

[Steve Dekorte <steve@...>]

Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
> >I suppose that you could also write something
> >to turn these structures into a string and call dostring() but then you've
> >got the whole code structure -> text -> compiled code that scheme avoids.
> 
> I don't get it. Why convert the tables into strings??

I meant convert them to their code equivalent and compile it so it will
execute faster. For example:
 
  7 + ( 4 * 3 )

executes faster than:

  E{add,7,{mul,4,3}}

right?

So make a function that turns:

 {add,7,{mul,4,3}}

into:

 myFunc = dostring("return function () return args.1 + ( args.2 * args.3 )")

and precompile it. Then execute it with the current args:

 result = myFunc({7,4,3})

This is important for genetic algorithms because we typically run the
same genome's algorithm over large data sets. (In my application I'm
running each genome on about quater of a million data points to evaluate 
it's fitness - this has to be done for 100s of genomes for 100s of generations) 

Steve