Bill Talada (1/15/2010)
To keep the code sample very small, I cut some corners. The code that "looks" at the surroundings of the robot assumes a square border around a 10 x 10 grid. Inserting a 2 into the grid won't help; it will be ignored currently. I would have loved to implement a crazy maze but my objective was to make it easy for people to understand Genetic Algorithms.
Understood. And I really enjoyed reading your article and playing around with the sample code. Great job!
You made me think of using this base concept in reverse, meaning you'll have a given number of cans (e.g. 20, 30 and 40), a 10x10 box and you need to build a pattern that comes closest to some given rules (e.g. the first 5 rows have to be evenly distributed, rows 6 and 7 need to be aligned left, rows 8 and 9 need to be aligned to the right and row 10 needs to be centered and each "column" should have the same number of cans.) Optimum would be calculated using a similar +/- point system... So, my kids most probably won't like it seing me spend the weekend trying to figure out if there's a basic reverse logic to what you came up with...