FYI: AI-programmer

[Andrew Robinson]

On 02/22/2013 07:21 PM, Ian Kelly wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 4:41 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>> That's not artificial intelligence, though. It's artificial program
>> generation based on a known target output. The "Fitness" calculation
>> is based on a specific target string. This is fine for devising a
>> program that will produce the entire works of Shakespeare, since there
>> is a target string for that (actually, several targets, plus you have
>> to work out whether you want the works of Shakespeare or the works of
>> some guy named Bacon... mmm bacon), but I suggest that a more
>> sophisticated and useful goal be implemented.
> Indeed, it seems to me that this is basically Richard Dawkins' weasel
> program, with the addition of a transformation step in the fitness
> function that amounts to running the string through a Brainfuck
> interpreter.  There is a rather large gap between this and getting
> computers to generate programs that do anything interesting.
>
> I am curious about how he deals with infinite loops in the generated
> programs.  Probably he just kills the threads after they pass some
> time threshold?
I'm under the impression that Python doesn't really allow you to kill a 
thread after a time period.
It's not portable to do so....

http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/08/22/how-not-to-set-a-timeout-on-a-computation-in-python/