Amir Karger writes:
> Yet another interesting aspect of this is that it would > foster the maximum number of algorithms without regard for > length -- gradually evolution would allow the most > shortenable solutions to survive. (For the physicists and > computational chemists and biologists in the crowd, we're > thermostatting the system at a high temperature first to > allow for good equilibration, then gradually quenching it and > throwing out local minima, until we hopefully find the "true" > minimum. Call it the "protein golfing" problem!) I believe this is also referred to as "annealing", and is a popular function minimization algorithm for NP-complete problems. This revives an old idea I had during the Santa tournament where a genetic algorithm is used to evolve potential hole solutions. The way it works is to initially create a large number of random solutions, and let them evolve by mating and mutating their way towards a legal solution. It would be extremely interesting to see how the same evolutionary process that led to the development of the human brain can fare against our resident Aliens :) Anyone interested in taking that idea to the next step? /-\|_/-\
