Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
laziness, impatience, and hubris
 
PerlMonks  

Re^2: Looking for help with AI::Genetic and classroom scheduling

by merlyn (Sage)
on Feb 20, 2005 at 14:02 UTC ( [id://432863]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re: Looking for help with AI::Genetic and classroom scheduling
in thread Looking for help with AI::Genetic and classroom scheduling

Your fitness function should have a good gradient over the entire search space. Some impossible schedules are more impossible than others. Take off X points for each instructor conflict, Y points for each room conflict, etc. You'll get continually closer to a valid schedule.
And that's also the "aha!" that I had when I wrote the code I pasted earlier. I was thinking too literally in terms of genetics. I would have considered "impossible" solutions as "stillborn" offspring that should never exist to roam around and mate, so I was stumped trying to figure out how to prevent such an individual from ever ending up in the gene pool.

Once I realized that I could just put them in the "undesirable" category by dinging them for unworkabilities, the GA did the right thing, and kept mixing up the "least undesirable", and within a dozen generations, I had a breeding population that was "in the black" (all hard constraints satisified, and thus now working on optimizing the soft constraints).

Cool.

Well, I learned something. This is always a good thing.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: note [id://432863]
help
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others contemplating the Monastery: (4)
As of 2024-03-29 00:31 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?

    No recent polls found