2 August 2012

Admin

Lee would like everyone to send weekly status reports either to him personally or to the list. His preference would be for all emails to go to the list, but if there is something that is more appropriate to just a few people, that's fine, too.

Common reading (2 Goodman papers on statistics)

Discussed misconceptions about p-values (esp. the comment at the bottom of p997). Zeke mentioned a talk that might be of interest. Tom was interested in how this related to GPBenchmarks. There are two cases that were brought up. The first was the case where we're just interested in finding a solution. This would be for problems where we do not expect to find solutions in general or where we know that finding solutions is very hard. The second case is the one wherein we are comparing techniques and want to measure how one compares to the other. This would be the case where we expect to find a solution and are interested in wether one techniue offers better performance than the other. This ist he case where p-values adn typically used and owuld need to be reassessed in light of the expressed problems with p-values.

Note also this series of blog posts that may be of interest:

Criticism 1 of NHST: Good Tools for Individual Researchers are not Good Tools for Research

Criticism 2 of NHST: NHST Conflates Rare Events with Evidence Against the Null Hypothesis

Criticism 3 of NHST: Essential Information is Lost When Transforming 2D Data into a 1D Measure

Criticism 4 of NHST: No Mechanism for Producing Substantive Cumulative Knowledge

Here is also a more recent article from Steven Goodman that summarizes problems with p-values.

Possible applications to education / intelligent tutoring systems

After contacting Sumit Gulwani, Lee is looking for connections with automated test generation. Tom has suggested jumping off from the bug-fixing work and applying to this problem. Since there are a lot of projects already scheduled, Lee is looking for opportunities to expand or connect our current projects to this work.

Project updates and planning for tangible results

Zeke: Working ont he logical elements of his chemistry system, looking to use spectra rather than graphical representations. Having issues with the ordering on the molecules ("Atom 0 problem"). Omri's suggestion is to use the heaviest atom as the starting point. The plan for August is for Zeke to hammer out the representation and start evolving molecules as soon as possible.

Omri: Working on a new Clojush interpreter with scoping options, including a scoping specification called "periscope." No recent work on the flea market. Goal by the end of August is to have the flea market environment available as a experimental evolutionary system. Still having issues with pathological cases for essential vs. nonessential goods.

Kwaku: Currently working on modularity isses.. Taking the top 20 individuals and their modules and re-inserting these seccessful program's modules in the population. Currently looking for good problems.

Tom: Doing work on lexicase selection and exploring extant greedy approaches and current work on production systems. Lee believes that a graph or lattice-like strucutre that's pre-computed will make this computation fast. Also working on kata bowling; have found solutions for easy configurations; none for hard configurations. Some solutions have been found using lexicase.

Emma: Possible future meeting topic: tutorial on how to use the database.

Next week's readings:

Spreadsheet Data Manipulation Using Examples (sent in email), Sumit Gulwani, William R. Harris, Rishabh Singh

Example-Driven Program Synthesis for End-User Programming (sent in email), Marin C. Rinard

Dimensions in Program Synthesis, Sumit Gulwani

Also, for the theoetical background consider this paper on version algebras.

Next Meeting

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