Thursday, February 23, 2006
Change the world
Read my short review of Quinn's book Change the World over at The Entrepreneurial Engineer here. (Note to Nosophorus: yes, change can be dangerous to the status quo.)
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Hi, Dr Goldberg!!
You are so funny. :D
Well, I am going now to an Optimization class, when I come back, maybe, I answer something here about.
Até Mais!!
Marcelo (a.k.a Nosophorus)
You are so funny. :D
Well, I am going now to an Optimization class, when I come back, maybe, I answer something here about.
Até Mais!!
Marcelo (a.k.a Nosophorus)
Hello, Dr Goldberg!!
First of all:
Status Quo:
Status quo is a Latin term meaning the present current, existing state of affairs. To maintain the status quo is to keep things the way they presently are.
I do not think that you are phony/hypocrite, I consider you an important person inside Evolutionary Computation (meanly Genetic Algorithms), although you avoid to use that term, and you are an opinion that deserves to be heard. A thing that I do not appreciate is when you want to show Genetic Algorithms as the Ultimate EC Tool in the Universe (however it is normal, since there is not a mother that would think her child as an ugly one). C'mon, you and me know that is not true, see the NFL clichè and all those critiques about the two mean ideas that (try to?) explain the Genetic Algorithms: Building Block Hypothesis and Schema Theorem. I know, the discussion about those ideas are old and always there will be discordances about the way GAs work, but what we need to avoid is to be traped in traditional explanations forever (status quo DETECTED!!!) and we need to experiment/try another view, but at same time we should be very rigorous and perceptive, otherwise we would not offer serious explanations with rigorous analysis, but just excuses/apologizes (like the Wright Brothers Approach, Little Models and Conceptual Machines) for not to have a good investigation about some subject. If we do not have a good explanation, would be much more interesting to be honest and admit it. Once I cited here Hans-Georg Beyer's paper called
How GAs do NOT Work - Understanding GAs without Schemata and Building Blocks. Technical Report SYS-2/95, Department of Computer Science, University of Dortmund, 1995.
That paper was rejected by the ICGA 95 and we lost the chance to talk about new ideas that could help to explain the way GAs work. I consider that paper very interesting, because it "tried to break" (I would prefer to say that it tried to help to explain the way GAs work) the status quo of Genetic Algorithms. To be honest, I think that no paper that criticizes BBH and Schema Theorem would be accepted at anyone EC conference where you, Dr Goldberg, participate. By the way, all those critics do not mean that we should put Genetic Algorithms in a thrash can, I disagree with this idea, because GAs are good heuristics (just do not ask for theory and rigorous proof) and I will use it if I need.
When I asked if you had sold the BBH (Building Block Hypothesis), I did not want to be offensive, I only wanted to know what you have done to help your students to accept/understand/buy it as a true argument that really explains the working of GAs (example of this is the hBOA by Dr Martin Pelikan. I wonder if hBOA would inherit all those problems that Genetic Algorithms have with BBH and Schema Theorem).
About the Tolstoi quote, well, you should admit that it is true. I guess I am not being melevolent with you, on the contrary, I suppose I am doing a thing that very few people would do, pincipally your colleagues at IlliGAL, since they agree with you.
And, as we are talking about changes, in your classical book about Genetic Algorithms, there are some mistakes related to Evolutionary Programming and Evolution Strategies, some of them tell us that the schema processing of ES are limited and other say that EP only solves simple problems. Have you already writen some errata about it ? If not, would be nice to do.
All models are wrong, but some are useful! :D
Até Mais!!
Marcelo (a.k.a Nosophorus)
P.S: The link at TEE blog is broken. Here you are a good one:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0787951935/sr=8-1/qid=1140740996/ref=sr_1_1/104-6044276-5014359?%5Fencoding=UTF8
I do not like that kind of book. I think that kind of book are for two types of persons: Women with no husband and men with freudian insecurity and that had entered the andropause.
P.S: I had began to wrote here a thing called E3C - Evolutinary Computation Comedy Comics - but I think that is better to stop. I was writing the texts and my friend had drawn some sketches, the first episode would be "A Day at IlliGAL", but I stopped, since I do not want to offend anyone.
P.S: Some fun now!! :D
http://i.somethingawful.com/inserts/articlepics/photoshop/12-23-05-comics/FatGuyMac.jpg
Post a Comment
First of all:
Status Quo:
Status quo is a Latin term meaning the present current, existing state of affairs. To maintain the status quo is to keep things the way they presently are.
I do not think that you are phony/hypocrite, I consider you an important person inside Evolutionary Computation (meanly Genetic Algorithms), although you avoid to use that term, and you are an opinion that deserves to be heard. A thing that I do not appreciate is when you want to show Genetic Algorithms as the Ultimate EC Tool in the Universe (however it is normal, since there is not a mother that would think her child as an ugly one). C'mon, you and me know that is not true, see the NFL clichè and all those critiques about the two mean ideas that (try to?) explain the Genetic Algorithms: Building Block Hypothesis and Schema Theorem. I know, the discussion about those ideas are old and always there will be discordances about the way GAs work, but what we need to avoid is to be traped in traditional explanations forever (status quo DETECTED!!!) and we need to experiment/try another view, but at same time we should be very rigorous and perceptive, otherwise we would not offer serious explanations with rigorous analysis, but just excuses/apologizes (like the Wright Brothers Approach, Little Models and Conceptual Machines) for not to have a good investigation about some subject. If we do not have a good explanation, would be much more interesting to be honest and admit it. Once I cited here Hans-Georg Beyer's paper called
How GAs do NOT Work - Understanding GAs without Schemata and Building Blocks. Technical Report SYS-2/95, Department of Computer Science, University of Dortmund, 1995.
That paper was rejected by the ICGA 95 and we lost the chance to talk about new ideas that could help to explain the way GAs work. I consider that paper very interesting, because it "tried to break" (I would prefer to say that it tried to help to explain the way GAs work) the status quo of Genetic Algorithms. To be honest, I think that no paper that criticizes BBH and Schema Theorem would be accepted at anyone EC conference where you, Dr Goldberg, participate. By the way, all those critics do not mean that we should put Genetic Algorithms in a thrash can, I disagree with this idea, because GAs are good heuristics (just do not ask for theory and rigorous proof) and I will use it if I need.
When I asked if you had sold the BBH (Building Block Hypothesis), I did not want to be offensive, I only wanted to know what you have done to help your students to accept/understand/buy it as a true argument that really explains the working of GAs (example of this is the hBOA by Dr Martin Pelikan. I wonder if hBOA would inherit all those problems that Genetic Algorithms have with BBH and Schema Theorem).
About the Tolstoi quote, well, you should admit that it is true. I guess I am not being melevolent with you, on the contrary, I suppose I am doing a thing that very few people would do, pincipally your colleagues at IlliGAL, since they agree with you.
And, as we are talking about changes, in your classical book about Genetic Algorithms, there are some mistakes related to Evolutionary Programming and Evolution Strategies, some of them tell us that the schema processing of ES are limited and other say that EP only solves simple problems. Have you already writen some errata about it ? If not, would be nice to do.
All models are wrong, but some are useful! :D
Até Mais!!
Marcelo (a.k.a Nosophorus)
P.S: The link at TEE blog is broken. Here you are a good one:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0787951935/sr=8-1/qid=1140740996/ref=sr_1_1/104-6044276-5014359?%5Fencoding=UTF8
I do not like that kind of book. I think that kind of book are for two types of persons: Women with no husband and men with freudian insecurity and that had entered the andropause.
P.S: I had began to wrote here a thing called E3C - Evolutinary Computation Comedy Comics - but I think that is better to stop. I was writing the texts and my friend had drawn some sketches, the first episode would be "A Day at IlliGAL", but I stopped, since I do not want to offend anyone.
P.S: Some fun now!! :D
http://i.somethingawful.com/inserts/articlepics/photoshop/12-23-05-comics/FatGuyMac.jpg
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