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Yes, I can certainly point you in the right direction. Toby Segaran, author of the highly esteemed and good-read Programming Collective Intelligence (published

by conesus 17y ago

Yes, I can certainly point you in the right direction. Toby Segaran, author of the highly esteemed and good-read Programming Collective Intelligence (published by O'Reilly, so you know it's good), released all of the source code that he talked about in the book. You can find it all here on his blog: http://blog.kiwitobes.com/?p=44 http://blog.kiwitobes.com/?p=44. He talks about hill climbing and variants (random restart, simulated annealing). He does a great job of explaining the algorithm and the math behind the hill climbing decisions. For optimization, something hill climbing is not even the best tool. Look at some of the other optimization strategies he employs (specifically the genetic mutation algorithm). I highly recommend buying the book, even if only one chapter currently interests you. I bet you the other chapters will too. It's on Amazon, and at B&N if you want it this second.

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
Brilliant - thanks - I'll check that out. I do know that hill-climbing isn't always the best strategy - I've got experience. What I'm lacking is knowledge of people from other disciplines doing things in an organised and more complete manner. This is a good start. I've also found AIMA stuff on Google - http://code.google.com/p/aima-python/ http://code.google.com/p/aima-python/ - which claimsto be a Python implementation of algorithms from Russell and Norvig's 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach'
- euccastro 17y ago
  I haven't done much of a survey, but I stumbled into this and looks promising: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_swarm_optimization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_swarm_optimization I found this book a very enjoyable read (edit: and a lot less intimidating than the Wikipedia article!). Be warned, though, that it's one or two chapters worth of technical detail. The rest goes to motivating the subject and exploring its philosophical implications. And that is OK, because the algorithm is actually quite simple. http://tinyurl.com/lns85a http://tinyurl.com/lns85a

by conesus 17y ago

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago

Brilliant - thanks - I'll check that out. I do know that hill-climbing isn't always the best strategy - I've got experience. What I'm lacking is knowledge of people from other disciplines doing things in an organised and more complete manner. This is a good start. I've also found AIMA stuff on Google - http://code.google.com/p/aima-python/ http://code.google.com/p/aima-python/ - which claimsto be a Python implementation of algorithms from Russell and Norvig's 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach'

euccastro 17y ago
I haven't done much of a survey, but I stumbled into this and looks promising: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_swarm_optimization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_swarm_optimization I found this book a very enjoyable read (edit: and a lot less intimidating than the Wikipedia article!). Be warned, though, that it's one or two chapters worth of technical detail. The rest goes to motivating the subject and exploring its philosophical implications. And that is OK, because the algorithm is actually quite simple. http://tinyurl.com/lns85a http://tinyurl.com/lns85a