Thursday, February 11, 2010

Waterloo Contest and Human Intelligence

I've entered the Waterloo university Google AI Challenge, hiding under a cunning nickname, since I saw that you could develop in Haskell, and a few others Haskellers are on it too! At the moment, I'm cruising at around the 110th position, which is not too bad given that I only worked a few hours at night on it (I have a day job, you know...) and that I implemented everything myself since the starter pack wasn't ready when I started working. I've played a bit with the standard strategies, implemented some flood fill, reuse some A* implementation I have.
All of this is interesting, of course, but there is no AI as such. The only intelligence in my code is the one I put in, and the strategies I devised. So I'm thinking of playing around with genetic programming and evolution techniques to try to get my code to find the right strategies at the right time. I have the feeling the trick will be to design something that is not too restricted and is truly able to evolve into some more advanced and complex than what I've designed myself. But hey, I'll learn, even if my program doesn't (-:

Monday, February 01, 2010

EclipseFP 1.110 released, with debugging support

Hello,
I have released a new version of EclipseFP. OK, I haven't kept to the one-release-a-month schedule, but with the Christmas season and everything, I deserved a break.
I have fixed a few issues here and there (thanks for everybody who commented on the blog or used the Sourceforge tracker or forum), and tried to externalize strings into resources, but there's still a lot to be done on that subject.
I have mainly worked at integrating the GHCi debugger with the Eclipse debugging framework. This tutorial was really useful! Now what works is that you can set breakpoints in the source, and GHCi will stop at them if launched in debug mode in Eclipse. Once stopped (either via a breakpoint or if you use :step) you can see the bindings and force their evaluation (use the set value to variable function in Eclipse). You can also create some expressions and get them evaluated. Underneath with use GHCi commands like :show bindings, etc.
I have removed some obsolete preferences and added debugging preferences (stop on error/exception, use show instances...).
I'll be happy with any feedback on all these features. One thing missing is support for :hist when invoking :trace, tell me if you'd like that.
Enjoy!