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Neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (NEAT algorithm)

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Re: Neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (NEAT algorithm)

#31

NEAT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroevolution_of_augmenting_t... NEAT > See also links to EANT. EANT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_acquisition_of_ne... : > Evolutionary acquisition of neural topologies (EANT/EANT2) is an evolutionary reinforcement learning method that evolves both the topology and weights of artificial neural networks. It is closely related to the works of Angeline et al. [1] and S…

EANT2 looks really cool, thanks for the link.

Re: Neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (NEAT algorithm)

#32

Legendary Sethbling video from 2015 where he implemented NEAT for SMW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44&t=1

Thanks for that link! There is another video posted 7 months ago from Seth where he interviews Ken Stanley, the creator of the NEAT algorithm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zg_5hg8Ydo

This is really interesting, I remember seeing the Mar/IO video and being psyched that someone took Kenneth O. Stanley's work and applied it to something fun, but I had no idea how impactful that video actually turned out to be. Having spent O(hundreds) of hours reading his papers and thinking about those ideas a decade+ ago, this interview serves a really interesting role for me personally, because it connects conversationally in a way papers don't.

Re: Neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (NEAT algorithm)

#33
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I was in college in the early 2000s I played around with genetic algorithms and artificial life simulations on a cluster of IBM Cell Broadband Engine processors Early/Mid/Late 2000's I was working on a hobby project for artificial life with ga evolved brains. I spent a lot of time investigating options, like the cell processor (I bought a playstation to test with). I also looked at interesting multi-core cpu's…

> I ended up with a combo of CPU+GPU on networked PC's, which was better than nothing but not ideal. The biggest constraint I've seen with scaling up these simulations is maintaining coherence of population dynamics across all of the processing units. The less often population members are exchanged, the more likely you will wind up with a decoupled population and stuck in a ditch somewhere. Since modern CPUs can go s…

> The biggest constraint I've seen with scaling up these simulations is maintaining coherence of population dynamics across all of the processing units

Agreed. For mine I purposefully avoided this problem by making the population+world relatively small (My dream was to scale this thing up significantly, but life intervened, maybe someday.

Re: Neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (NEAT algorithm)

#34
post #2

I post a link to NEAT here about once a week. The big problem is that NEAT can't leverage a GPU effectively at scale (arbitrary topologies vs bipartite graphs) Other than that, it feels like a "road not taken" of machine learning. It handles building complex agent behaviors really well, and pressure to minimal topology results in understandable and reverse interpretable networks. Its easier to learn and implement tha…

I've used NEAT a few for a few different things. The main upside of it is that it requires a lot less hyper-parameter tuning than modern reinforcement learning options. But that's really the only advantage. It really only works on a subset of reinforcement learning tasks (online episodic). Also, it is a very inefficient search of the solution space as compared to modern options like PPO. It also only works on problems with fairly low dimensional inputs/outputs.

That being said, it's elegant and easy to reason about. And it's a nice intro into reinforcement learning. So definitely worth learning.

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