At 22:44 +0100 11/1/99, Stephan Rudlof wrote:
>
>Random generator are very important for such interesting areas like
>evolutionary algorithms (GA, ES, GP, etc.) and Artificial Life. I think
>Squeak could be a good platform for such research and _games_ (I like
>games...)! I was surprised by a random generator with a quiet short period
>(is this the right word in English? It means repeating seq) in VW which I
>used for my Diploma thesis...
>
>Stephan


The last time I looked (several years ago) it still had a horrid 
generator with a period of 64K. It's easy to fix; there are 
Park-Miller generators available for most any Smalltalk system.

I fully agree that evolutionary algorithms is another very 
interesting place that makes heavy use of randoms. Unfortunately, 
very high performance is needed for serious work; John Kosa (the GP 
guy) has abandoned LISP and gone to a system based in C and even used 
multiprocessing to try to get the performance needed for real-world 
problems. Maybe plugins can help?

Dave


_______________________________
David N. Smith
IBM T J Watson Research Center
Hawthorne, NY
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herein are those of the author
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