[Push] RANDOM-SEED parameter

[Lee Spector]

Yeah, I'm just multi-threading to run evolutionary algorithms (PushGP and variants) multicore. As we get into double-digit numbers of cores it makes a big difference.

 -Lee

On Jun 30, 2010, at 2:21 PM, Rud Merriam wrote:

> Is the main reason you are using multi-threading for individuals to support
> multi-core processors? My implementation is single threaded (although I
> think except for one situation it is thread safe). 
> 
> Are there cases where multi-threading is useful?
> 
> 
> - 73 - 
> Rud Merriam K5RUD 
> http://mysticlakesoftware.com/
> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Lee Spector [mailto:lspector at hampshire.edu] 
>> Sent: Wednesday, June 30, 2010 12:58 PM
>> To: PerPlex Ed
>> Cc: push at lists.hampshire.edu
>> Subject: Re: [Push] RANDOM-SEED parameter
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Wow that's a lot of RNG initialization time.
>> 
>> I see that there are some interesting issues here, 
>> potentially from the distributions etc. you'd get from 
>> re-seeding and/or use of seeded RNGs as funky ways to store 
>> or refer to sequences. But for what it's worth my practice 
>> has historically been just to seed once at startup (as 
>> illustrated by the fact that my method for re-seeding didn't 
>> work :-). 
>> 
>> In the Clojush/concurrent context I've been actually been 
>> using as many RNGs as there are individuals in the 
>> population, as a quick hack to ensure that there's never 
>> contention for the same RNG from different threads. But I 
>> initialize each of these only once, at the start of a run.
>> 
>> -Lee
>> 
> 
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--
Lee Spector, Professor of Computer Science
School of Cognitive Science, Hampshire College
893 West Street, Amherst, MA 01002-3359
lspector at hampshire.edu, http://hampshire.edu/lspector/
Phone: 413-559-5352, Fax: 413-559-5438

Check out Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines:
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