Group items tagged

Idea page on PaGMO ... if not in GSoC we should do the Alife on Asteroid at least!!!

For Dario, as they quote him heavily...

Yep, I was told already a few months ago from Storn that this is indeed the best adaptive DE ever made. It is already in the road map for pagmo 1.2. According to pagmo it humiliates CMAES !!!

And in case you didn't notice, the first author is an undergraduate student.

We made it to Slashdot's frontpage !!! :)

Congratulations, gentlemen!

who wants 100 cores ... future of PAGMO?

The problem with this flurry of activity today regarding multicore architectures is that it is really unclear which one will be the winner in the long run. Never understimate the power of inertia, especially in the software industry (after all, people are still programming in COBOL and Fortran today). For instance, NVIDIA gives you the Teslas with 10000 cores, but then you have to rewrite extensive parts of your code in order to take advantage of this. Is this an investment worth undertaking? Difficult to say, it would certainly be if the whole software world moves into that direction (which is not happening - yet?). But then you have other approaches coming out, suche as the Cell processor by IBM (the one on the PS3) which has really impressive floating point performance and, of course, a completely different programming model. The nice thing about this Tilera processor seems to be that it is a general-purpose processor, which may not require extensive re-engineering of existing code (but I'm really hypothesizing, since the thechincal details are not very abundant on their website).

Moreover PaGMO computation model is more towards systems with distributed memory, and not with shared memory (i.e. multi-core). In the latter, at certain point the memory access becomes the bottleneck.

What is the best (wisest) size for a group of individuals? Couzin and Kao put together a series of mathematical models that included correlation and several cues. In one model, for example, a group of animals had to choose between two options-think of two places to find food. But the cues for each choice were not equally reliable, nor were they equally correlated. The scientists found that in these models, a group was more likely to choose the superior option than an individual. Common experience will make us expect that the bigger the group got, the wiser it would become. But they found something very different. Small groups did better than individuals. But bigger groups did not do better than small groups. In fact, they did worse. A group of 5 to 20 individuals made better decisions than an infinitely large crowd. The problem with big groups is this: a faction of the group will follow correlated cues-in other words, the cues that look the same to many individuals. If a correlated cue is misleading, it may cause the whole faction to cast the wrong vote. Couzin and Kao found that this faction can drown out the diversity of information coming from the uncorrelated cue. And this problem only gets worse as the group gets bigger.

Couzin research was the starting point that co-inspired PaGMO from the very beginning. We invited him (and he came) at a formation flying conference for a plenary here in ESTEC. You can see PaGMO as a collective problem solving simulation. In that respect, we learned already that the size of the group and its internal structure (topology) counts and cannot be too large or too random. One of the project the ACT is running (and currently seeking for new ideas/actors) is briefly described here (http://esa.github.io/pygmo/examples/example2.html) and attempts answering the question :"How is collective decision making influenced by the information flow through the group?" by looking at complex simulations of large 'archipelagos'.

Cool algorithm! We should implement it in PaGMO.

Francesco have a look at this if it could be of interest for pagmo?

What will the name of the CUDA-enabled PaGMO be? CuDMO, CyGMO?

"there is a call for a volunteer to develop the C++ coding standards" Go for it! :-)

Of course, the golden PaGMO coding standard! :)

similar idea to ours.... but implemented

I like this work... it mixes physics, networks and biology ! Anyone heard about her ? Here's an interesting paper found on this website: http://nuweb.neu.edu/gbianconi/condensation.pdf

We worked on this with Luzi a few years back ... while the analogy is original and interesting it fails to capture the dynamics of a network, e.g. if a network has hubs that grow and shrink .... Luzi worked on an extended model to solve this issue, but, if I remember correctly, he got stuck in a computationally very hard problem .... We intended to develop and use the extended model to define relevant characteristic of the ESA network formed by mail exchanges.....

...but then the CMS YGT didn't really like the project

you propably already know,I post it for the twitter account and for your comments

but in any case, according to the apple guru, Java is a dying technology, so their project might as well ...

They participate under the name "The Java Pathfinder Team" (http://babelfish.arc.nasa.gov/trac/jpf/wiki/events/soc2010). It is actually a very useful project for both education and industry (Airbus created a consortium on model checking soft, and there is a lot of research on it) As far as I know, TAS had some plans of using Java onboard spacecrafts, 2 years ago. Not sure the industry is really sensible about Jobs' opinions ;) particularly if there is no better alternative!

Another great presentation at this conference!! Plus I always wanted to enter the numerical computations of orbit around black holes.... with Luzi we had a project on formation flying around black holes .... revolutionary idea (of course we did not do it!!!)

nice movie, and song :) we should definitely implement GR orbits in pagmo !

I agree Marek, yet was it practical for Apollonio to study conic sections more than 1500 years before Kepler found his three laws? And here is a good paper to start with: http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v77/i10/e103005, making an analogy between the periodic table and the taxomony of all orbits around a black hole.

one for the IT freaks ... - what will it be in 10 years then?

PaGMO on a stack of iPads? Sounds good...

Spare processing power anyone? Based on BOINC.

Article on migration policies in the island model. Focus on so-called "multikulti" approach which fosters diversification. Interesting quote: "Other possible avenues of research will be to investigate the influence of the topology on the performance, in relation with the average path length from one node to another and in the sense of the general connectivity." Would be indeed...

I was so shocked not to see Dario in the authors list!

still practically as an ACT paper ... the first author was the first RF of the team and the one who suggested Dario ...

Yeah I've figured it out from his CV at the end of the article after posting :)