in reply to Evolving formulae

If anybody out there is scratching their heads over why we need such a complicated and slow way to calculate Pi, well, here is a "hard problem" to solve.

The problem is "inverse Boggle." In the game of Boggle, the player has a grid of letters, and he must find words by connecting adjacent letters. In "inverse Boggle" you are supplied a list of words, and the challenge is to fit as many as you can into a grid of fixed size.

A Programming contest was held to see who could come up with the fastest program to solve the problem with the best result. The winner of the contest used an evolutionary algorithm to find the solution.

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Re: Re: Evolving formulae
by flyingmoose (Priest) on Feb 25, 2004 at 21:42 UTC
    This is a fine example of evolutionary/genetic algorithms, although it does not address anything about why evolutionary/genetic algorithms are practical for finding mathematical functions that we do not know. Systems of finding polynomial representations is already well-known in math without GA, perhaps the author would do better if he included a problem to be solved that used something more than trivial operators -- perhaps a problem in a high number of dimensions, involving complex numbers, trig, etc. Somewhere where Taylor's series (and other variants) break down.

    This is what I'm interested in seeing. We know cases where EA can be applied well and where it might be a better way of solving a problem...but the rule is, "when better ways exist", use them.

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