Galapagos 1st gen randomness constraint

Hi everyone

I noticed that the values set in the sliders when you start galapagos are used as part of the first generation.

Two consideration come to my mind

- Strictly speaking the first gen is not really random... I personally don't care

- You can actually use this to show galapagos a solution that you would like to consider.

The second point opens a question

Could galapagos have a value to limit the randomness of the first generation?

For instance, say I have 10 sliders, there are several possible solutions but there is one that I prefer. I could approximate it with the sliders manually and ask galapagos to find the best solution in a 20% range for instance. I know I can already do this by reducing the slider's domain but I would have to do it 10 times, one for each slider.

If you set the 1st gen randomness value to 100% it would be just like it is now.

Bye

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 22, 2011 at 4:34am

Hi Frane,

it is technically a bug that the slider setup is copied once in the first generation. It shouldn't happen because the current slider positions might denote a local optimum you're not interested in.

There is a little dropdown arrow next to the Start Solver button and you can force the first population to be clustered around the current sliders. There's no way to specifically override how random however.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Frane Zilic on April 23, 2011 at 3:49pm

Hi David

Wasn't expecting an answer from you... you are supposed to take your vacations, we need you to rest and then continue developping GH... ;)

That dropdown option is what I was looking for! I set the mutations to something like

Frequency 10 Strength 1

Frequency 90 Strength 10

And I got something like I was looking for.

I would be nice to be able to control how random that first generation is... It looks like it is set to something like a 10 or 5% variation right now.

Bye and have a good time.

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