From: Richard Loosemore (rpwl@lightlink.com)
Date: Thu Feb 09 2006 - 07:31:09 MST
Chris Capel wrote:
> On 2/8/06, Jef Allbright <jef@jefallbright.net> wrote:
>> Came across this lucid and current paper that touches upon much of the
>> subject matter of this discussion list. Recommended.
>>
>> http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/bulletin/logic-of-diversity.html
>
> I wonder how the introduction of random steps, a bit of noise, into
> the other heuristics of the strong heuristic agents would affect their
> aggregate performance. I wonder if this was considered. My intuition
> is that putting some noise into the search process (especially in a
> simulated annealing sort of way) would be a big improvement.
Interesting you should put it that way, because my first thought was
that the role that "diversity" played *was*, in effect, equivalent (or
at least, akin to) to simulated annealing.
The purpose of SA would be to keep the temperature up high enough to
allow a global search for the largest-scale minimum, then lower the
temperature and progressively look for the best of the smaller-scale
minima within the larger one.
Of course, the reason this would not be appropriate (I'm reversing
myself now) is that SA has the fault that if there is an extremely good
but very isolated (=unexpected, quirky) solution, it'll miss it.
Like if Heim turns out to be right about Quantum Gravity.
[Oh, btw, completely off topic I know, but does anyone here know where
to find any online copies of Heim's main book in the original German?
Darned if I can find it, so maybe it's not public domain yet].
Richard Loosemore
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