ANN: EvNim uses neuroevolution to evolve an ANN that plays the gameof Nim

[Michael Livsey]

The people at ANNEvolve have been working hard again and have released
EvNim 1.08. This new release fixes a bug in earlier versions. The effect
was to initialize only a small part of each chromosome in the initial
population, leaving most of the chromosome with zeroes. Version 1.08
will evolve faster, especially at the beginning.

EvNim uses neuroevolution to evolve an ANN that plays the game of Nim.
In this version of Nim two players begin the game with 15 "beans". As
the game play continues players take turns removing beans. On each turn
a player may remove 1, 2 or 3 beans. Each player must remove at least
one bean and may not take more than 3. The player removing the last bean
loses. EvNim will evolve a perfect player of the game. This is
accomplished purely by a tournament among the population of ANNs, hence
the perfect player ANN is created with no game analysis by the
programmer. A hand-written perfect player is used to evaluate the
results, but this information is not used in any way to guide the
evolution or to influence the construction of the ANNs.

Evnim is written in standard C with no extra libraries required for
compilation. It is extensively documented. Much more information, and
all source code, is included in the downloadable files at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/annevolve

Comments and questions about EvNim may be posted on the ANNEvolve
mailing list by sending email to (e-mail address removed).
You may post without subscribing, but anyone may subscribe to this
mailing list. The list archives may be viewed at:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=32765.

The ANNEvolve team is experimenting with the Evolution of Artificial
Neural Networks (ANNs). They are combining the two fields of
Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Neural Networks. Find out more
about other ANN evolution programs at the Annevolve project at:
http://annevolve.sourceforge.net

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[Terry Reedy]

The people at ANNEvolve have been working hard again and have released
EvNim 1.08. ... Evnim is written in standard C

Does this have anything to do with Python; if not (and I cannot see any
connection from what you posted), this is off-topic.

Are you going to read replies posted on comp.lang.python? If not, this, to
me, is spam.

If each of the open-source projects at SourceForge and elsewhere, however
nice, posted one announcement here every three years, this newsgroup would
be clogged with about 100 such every day. The leaders of each project
think their project is important, but almost all know that other people
have other priorities. That is why SourceForge has a search facility.

Comments and questions about EvNim may be posted on the ANNEvolve
mailing list by sending email to (e-mail address removed).

So you acknowledge that discussion belongs there and not here.

I have doubts about the validity and value of the claims you posted. Are
you inviting me to share them on that list? If I did, would you and the
other participants consider them and respond politely?

Python 2.3.4 will be released within a week. Should someone post an
announcement to your list? If your project does not currently use Python,
how about a post explaining its benefits for your project?

Terry J. Reedy

 

[SeeBelow]

Does this have anything to do with Python; if not (and I cannot see any
connection from what you posted), this is off-topic.

I think this was a mistake by our reporter. We recently released a
Python program, but it was not this one. I agree that it is off-topic.

Mitchell Timin

--
"Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in
pursuit of the goal." - Friedrich Nietzsche

http://annevolve.sourceforge.net is what I'm into nowadays.
Humans may write to me at this address: zenguy at shaw dot ca

 

[Michael Livsey]

Sorry about the off topic post. My mistake. I got two articles mixed up
and accidently posted this one instead of the other.

Mike