In between bouts of painting and drywalling, as well as class and much needed napping, I’ve been able to get some more work done on Distributed Neuron. The code is fulfilling all my wildest dreams (except that one involving a beach and Jessica Alba…). It is very flexible and easy to update/manage. The time put into planning and designing a coherent layout is starting to payoff as I add features and more functionality.

Done

There are a slew of minor updates, best listed as bullet points:

-I recently implemented growth hormones as mentioned here.

-A simulation class has been built to manage the logistical details of running a simulation (physical dimensions, health blobs, location of organism, physics, etc).

-The client code is now autonomous, meaning it can recover itself from crashes as well as load new experiment/trial parameters when one trial finishes.

-Mutation has been completed on the entire genotype. Mutation is controllable by a value in the experimental parameters table, which is unaffected by mutation. This is so I can slow down or speed up mutation at will.

To Do

Oh but there is still much to do. In the next few days I am going to write up the initial fitness function. After this function is written I can begin some limited runs to create a starter population. Next on the drawing board is implementation of crossover mutation (sex FTW!) and running more lengthy trials to make sure the whole operation works.

If at that point I haven’t hit anything catastrophic, the next step is to work on the network code and start the server code. Which I’m not looking forward to but it is a necessary evil. So much to do, so little time!