I woke up 2 in the afternoon today. Even when I was staying awake for days at a time when I was writing that article last month, I never had crossed the AM/PM line for waking up. I wonder if it is the cold – today was a constant 8 degrees during the whole day, and everyone I called for a coffee out said they couldn’t go, so I end up staying the whole day at home…

Which means that I had plenty of time to keep hacking away at my Python problem :-). Today, I tried a more direct approach by try and coding directly the functions I needed, stopping to google a concept or another when I ran into something I did not understand. This worked surprisingly well, as I managed to intuitively use the list constructs and function in python to easily implement my genome, mutation, crossover operations, as well as population mechanics, like elite, sorting, tournament selection, etc. I did find my share of bizarre bugs, like once when I got confused about instance and class scopes, and that resulted in a constructor operator which generated bigger and bigger individuals in geometric progression and ate up all my computer’s memory in just 4 generations, but by the end of about 6 hours I managed to have a fully fledged evolutionary system (although with a dummy evaluation function). Tomorrow I’ll try writing the engine for my ETD game/evaluation function.

Besides that, I also read up two chapters in the new book I have started “Here Comes Everybody”, by Clay Shirky. The book talks about and tries to explain the phenomenon of the massive, loosely linked community actions, like wikipedia or flickr, based on the idea that the cost to maintaining social connections has collapsed in the past few years, which allowed non-profit actions which were too expensive for informal communities to organize, but too unprofitable for formal companies to tackle, to flourish. Reading the book I can’t help but feel that I had heard all this talk in many different blogs, forum/slashdot comments, and Free Software talks, but it is always nice to see everything put together in one cohesive, well argued text, and with plenty of interesting anecdotes to illustrate the concepts.

Talking about books, last week I also read “A Wizard of Earthsea”, by Ursula K. Le Guin, and I really really recommend this book. I devoured it in less than 2 days. This book is one of the precursors of Medieval Fantasy, and the wizards and how the magic works in Le Guin’s world is too charming. The concept that a Mage is just as powerful as he knows and understand the world around him draws you into her world. I hope I can make my own D&D world as mystical and still consistent as hers.

And that’s for a very cold and gray Sunday. I got one of my three bases covered :-)