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Experiment in GP based on ImageMagick

Well, it’s com­pli­cated; more on that (includ­ing pre­lim­i­nary results) over the week­end, hopefully.

Briefly, in prepar­ing an image library exten­sion and some demos (breed­ing pro­grams that play cards) for the genetic pro­gram­ming sys­tem I’m work­ing on with Jesse Sielaff and Trek Glowacki, we’re putting the Nudge lan­guage exten­sions through their paces.

As you know, Bob, one of the most impor­tant checks for rep­re­sen­ta­tional brit­tle­ness in genetic pro­gram­ming involves hav­ing a poke round with a mess of ran­dom pro­grams. You want to know whether every arbi­trary order­ing and jux­ta­po­si­tion is valid… but you can’t. So instead you cre­ate huge pile of ran­dom struc­tures, on the off chance that some odd com­bi­na­tion of syn­tac­tic ele­ments will crop up.

If you skip this step—even with a down­loaded library—you’re a baaaaaad genetic pro­gram­mer. Turn in your copy of Jaws and go back to machine learn­ing land.

Any­way. For the library we’re writ­ing in this image-​​handling demo, we’re depend­ing on good old sturdy but impen­e­tra­ble ImageMag­ick. In this case, for brit­tle­ness check­ing, one needs to make a few hun­dred thou­sand ran­dom image manip­u­la­tion scripts.

Just because it appealed to me, I jammed a few thou­sand together into a quick loop.

Oh, and DO NOT WATCH IF YOURE EPILEPTIC; DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPERATE MACHINERY, INCLUDING COMPUTERS, WHILE WATCHING THIS VIDEO; WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR DAMAGE TO FOVEA OR TEMPORARY AUTOTOPAGNOSIA.