answer-factory

Answer Factory: A system for pragmatic genetic programming projects

Caveat

THIS IS A PROJECT IN RAPID TRANSITION We're doing a lot of serious surgery right now (May 2010), and adding a lot of functionality very quickly.

What it does

The answer-factory gem includes scripting support for

• generating new design automation projects
• Nudge, a Turing-complete programming language for readable genetic programming
• some standard genetic programming search operators
• a standard suite of powerful metaheuristic tools
• full automated archiving of all solutions

and is introducing

• analytics and reporting
• administrative tools for managing AnswerFactory daemons
• reporting tools for exploring and directing search

The AnswerFactory infrastructure has been designed to help regular people build, run and manage technical experiments that use (among other things) genetic programming. There's a lot more in there... but that's the bottom line.

Getting started

The answer-factory gem depends on Ruby 1.9 or higher. We recommend rvm if you'd like to maintain several Ruby installations.

You'll also need a working installation of CouchDB available. This can be a remote instance, as long as you have the necessary permissions to create and manage databases.

Then: gem install answer-factory

This will automatically install several dependencies, including nudge, rspec, and others.

Creating a new AnswerFactory project

Use this command line script to build an AnswerFactory project folder:

answer-factory your-project-name

This will create a new directory called 'your-project-name' (in your current working directory), and install a rudimentary subtree of folders and files. Perhaps most important is activate.rb, which includes both configuration information and some examples of how to proceed.

Activating the AnswerFactory daemon

Make sure CouchDB is running and available, navigate to your project's root folder, and type ruby activate.rb

Generating new Nudge type definitions

The Nudge language gem installed along with answer-factory includes a full-featured programming language designed for genetic programming projects, with integer, floating-point, boolean, and code types.

Often your project's domain model will call for additional types. To generate some basic infrastructure for a new NudgeType subclass, navigate to the root of your project folder and invoke the thor script thor new_nudge_type your-nudge-type-name This will create a template for your class definition in the /lib/nudge/types subdirectory (which you should edit as indicated in the comments to use), several standard nudge instruction classes in /lib/nudge/instructions, and rspec files.

Replicating a pre-existing project or demo

TBD