Watchmaker Framework for Evolutionary Computation 0.4.3

Posted in Evolutionary Computation, Java by Dan on December 14th, 2007

This is mostly a maintenance release. Uncommons Maths is now a separate project so the Watchmaker Framework has been modified to use the official version of that library. There are a few other minor tweaks (a couple of classes have been moved around, but nothing in the core framework).

Version 0.4.3 also introduces an experimental EvolutionMonitor component. This a Swing view that gives you some insight into the current state of the population while your evolutionary algorithm is running. In this first version all it does is graph the mean and peak fitness scores (using JFreeChart). Future versions will hopefully display more information (perhaps I will add an API to enable data to be extracted from the population while running). The EvolutionMonitor implements the EvolutionObserver interface so you can hook it up easily by calling the addEvolutionObserver method of your EvolutionEngine.

The other new feature is a new termination condition for terminating the algorithm when the population fitness begins to stagnate. If this condition is used and there is no fitness improvement within a specified number of generations, the evolution engine will assume that no further improvement can be made and will return the fittest individual found so far. This is often a more practical approach than specifying a maximum total number of generations or a fixed time limit in advance.