FYI: AI-programmer

[Andrew Robinson]

On 02/22/2013 08:23 PM, Ian Kelly wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 5:09 AM, Andrew Robinson
> <andrew3 at r3dsolutions.com> wrote:
>> On 02/22/2013 07:21 PM, Ian Kelly wrote:
>>> 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....
> He's using C#, not Python.  And anyway, you can cooperatively request
> threads to shut down; just have the Brainfuck interpreter thread check
> for a shutdown request every N cycles, or even just place the timeout
> in the interpreter thread itself.
-----
1st)
It's still surprising that even C# would allow a killing of threads.

Resources can be allocated by a thread and tied up was one of the 
comments made on the site I linked; so those resources could be 
permanently tied up until process exit if the thread is killed.

eg: killing a thread is different from killing the process it is running in.

I'm not familiar enough with C# to know if it does garbage collection or 
not, or how de-allocation is handled; so perhaps I missed something.

------
2nd)

How would you get an interpreter thread to check for a shutdown request 
every N cycles?
I've read about how to set a timeout based on time, but not on any kind 
of cycle (eg: instruction cycle?) count.

Do you have a python example?
Thanks!