Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

Pyevolve was developed to be a complete genetic algorithm framework written in pure python, the main objectives of Pyevolve is:

* written in pure python, to maximize the cross-platform issue;
* easy to use API, the API must be easy for end-user;
* see the evolution, the user can and must see and interact with the evolution statistics, graphs and etc;
* extensible, the API must be extensible, the user can create new representations, genetic operators like crossover, mutation and etc;
* fast, the design must be optimized for performance;
* common features, the framework must implement the most common features: selectors like roulette wheel, tournament, ranking, uniform. Scaling schemes like linear scaling, etc;
* default parameters, we must have default operators, settings, etc in all options;
* open-source, the source is for everyone, not for only one.

More information:
Blog for Pyevolve
Documentation and downloads
GA Based Sorting using Pyevolve
MIT OpenCourseWare – Intro to Computer Science with Python

Yet another year, yet another dozen languages. Some times it seems as if all my time gets sapped up learning new languages. R is growing rapidly in popularity making news on Slashdot and the NYT late last year.

R provides a graphics package for visualizing your data, a data editor, data manipulation and has C/C++ interfaces. When R is open it provides a set of windows allowing you to interact with your data. The instruction manuals, tutorials, source code for Linux, OSX and Windows are available for free at the R Project site

R is also the name of a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it.

But R has also quickly found a following because statisticians, engineers and scientists without computer programming skills find it easy to use.

“R is really important to the point that it’s hard to overvalue it,” said Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google, which uses the software widely. “It allows statisticians to do very intricate and complicated analyses without knowing the blood and guts of computing systems.”

It is also free. R is an open-source program, and its popularity reflects a shift in the type of software used inside corporations. Open-source software is free for anyone to use and modify. I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Dell make billions of dollars a year selling servers that run the open-source Linux operating system, which competes with Windows from Microsoft. Most Web sites are displayed using an open-source application called Apache, and companies increasingly rely on the open-source MySQL database to store their critical information. Many people view the end results of all this technology via the Firefox Web browser, also open-source software. R, the software, finds fans in data analysts read more . . .

The R Project for Statistical Computing
Revolutions: How R is disrupting a billion dollar market

There are several tutorials and examples on the source forge site.

JGAP (pronounced “jay-gap”) is a Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming component provided as a Java framework. It provides basic genetic mechanisms that can be easily used to apply evolutionary principles to problem solutions. See the examples for a demonstration or watch out the graphical tree that can be created with JGAP for found solutions of genetically evolved programs.

JGAP was designed to be very easy to use “out of the box”, while also designed to be highly modular so that more adventurous users can easily plug-in custom genetic operators and other sub-components.

Download and more information at JGAP at SourceForge

More information:
Traveling Salesman problem solved with JGAP ( pdf )
A Genetic Algorithm Based Mobile Sensor Network Deployment Algorithm ( pdf )

Biota has podcasts, several open source artificial life projects, and papers all available for you to use. Biota exists to promote and assist the creation of biologically inspired artificial life forms in digital ecosystems. ( See the links page for a list of several projects )

The mission of Biota.org is to promote and assist in the engineering of complete, biologically-inspired, synthetic ecosystems and organisms. This involves the creation and deployment of digital tools and environments for simulation, research, and learning about living systems both natural and artificial. These tools could range from simple genetic algorithms all the way up to full multi-user virtual environments. Biota.org will seek to nourish a community of interest and to bring the experience of interacting with digital biota to a large audience through the medium of the Internet. Cyberbiology is Artificial Life made visible through Cyberspace.

More information:
Biota

Developed by Tom Ray, Tierra is a program that allows simple computer code to evolve and reproduce. Ray originally began as a biologist studying evolution and hoped to create an electric powered evolution machine to better study evolution. A friend in computer science and the current ( 1980s ) rash of computer viruses gave him the idea he needed.

To keep his creations from escaping or crashing his computer with bad code he wrote a computer emulator and let his creations loose in there. The first creation was an 80 byte program designed to fill in a free memory space on his computer with a copy of itself. Each program would continue its reproduction. The programs scrambled a few bits during the copy. If a program was broken enough to damage the computer or got too old it would be killed off.

After billions of generations working mutants appeared. Smaller programs doing the best since they needed the least resources. Parasites appeared which used other programs code to reproduce themselves. Programs would then evolve that had immunity to the parasites. Social programs evolved that would cooperate or steal from each other.

The algorithm has been on the internet and you can download it and experiment with Tom Rays programs.

More information and code:
Tierra home page