Show HN: My first Genetic Algorithm program

19 points

11 years ago

Wrote a program in FreeBASIC to try and find out how Genetic Algorithms work. It's a quick hack that I wrote to try some theories with because the Wikipedia Article on GAs reads like greek to me. So I built it from the general principles i knew at the time.

The "genome" per individual is an array of 9000 integers but I used only monochrome pictures with either black or white; An individual also has a fitness score.

There are 1000 individuals in the population and only two are selected to reproduce. So that makes 9 million (yes, MEELION as El Reg would write) data points and the scoring information being processed every time.

There's a 0.002% mutation rate just to keep things going because things tend to stall with monochrome data. A higher mutation rate and the algorithm will never approach maximum potential fitness, apparently.

The code is wildly unoptimized and it's my first draft. I could have used memory pointers to manipulate image data faster but this gets the job done so far. Processing color data takes a lot more time and this program wasn't written for that.

Runs on Windows. The source code needs to be cleaned up, so I didn't include or upload it. As far as i know, this may be sadly the only Genetic Algorithm program so far from the island of Mauritius. Download it here: https://sites.google.com/site/bryanbottebell/bryan-bottebell-s-projects/Imolver.zip

14 comments