[Icfp04-discuss] Evolutionary Ants

[Jens Hauke]

Detlef Pleiss wrote:
> BTW: The evolutionary approach definitely does require the programming of a
> working simulator :)
... which should run fast :-)

> I also tried starting the evolution with a random 10000 lines ant brain.
> I was amazed to see that even these actually collected some food!
> But as during some time they didn't evolve further than a couple points I
> dropped that approach.
Maybe try the same with less than 300 lines? I got much better results 
with very short ant programs (the search space is much smaller and good 
strategys dont need much code). The next improvement (i think): leave 
the goto's in each line nearly untouched to safe the program flow.

What are good criteria for good ants? Collecting much food or collecting 
more than the other? I used the second and saw, that the collecting rate 
decrease sometimes from 300 down to 10 during the evolution. Dont know 
why that could be better....

Jens