• Question: what kind of computer programs do you do?

    Asked by dingdong to David on 11 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by ohheycyd, bobablob.
    • Photo: David Corne

      David Corne answered on 11 Jun 2011:

      Broadly speaking, they can be summarised like this:

      first 50 lines of code:
      – read in some data
      middle 3000 lines of code:
      – do some utterly fantastic things with that data
      last 100 lines of code:
      – analyse the results and print things out

      In about half my programs, the input data describes some
      optimisation problem that needs to be solved (e.g. find the
      best schedule of activities to get these jobs done in
      a factory, or find the best collection of parameters to
      make this telecomms network give the best quality of
      service), and the “utterly fantastic thing” will be an
      evolutionary algorithm — that is, a technique that
      evolves solutions to problems, just like we have
      evolved from the primordial soup.

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