[Icfp04-discuss] Ant optimizers?

[Alejandro Forero Cuervo]

> Such  an optimizer  will destroy  the ant  for sure,  the ant's
> memory depends on identical codes in different places to embedd
> state information, it is the only working memory the ant has.

No.

If two states  are indeed identical, you can remove  one of them,
even if  they were associated  with different values  for certain
variables.   In this  case you  probably have  a variable  taking
different  values  embedded  in  the memory  but  the  same  code
executing regardless,  so you can  just ignore it and  expand the
code only once.

The optimizer would be trivial:

1. Find two identical instructions A, B.

2. Remove B.

3. Change all references to B.  Set them to the A.

4. Fix references to all the  instructions that move one position
   upwards (or move the last instruction to the position of B and
   fix references to it).

This would be executed until 1 fails.

Our team considered writing one such optimizer, but didn't do it,
as we didn't think it would help *our* ants very much (and we ran
out of time anyway).

Alejo.
http://bachue.com/alejo

---=(  Comunidad de Usuarios de Software Libre en Colombia  )=---                                                              
---=(  http://bachue.com/colibri )=--=( colibri at bachue.com  )=---                                                              
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