[Geneticd-devel] Merry Christmas and A happy new year and...

[Jonny M. <jon...@ni...>]

And something other.
I had the time to deal with some topics we needed to touch if we are to
proceed with massive parallel processing. Here I include the CVS log:

--------------------- Begin of CVS commit
Altered command "rset" so that now it stops immediately running
engines. This was necessary to ensure that the client is able to
stop an engine asynchronously, if the engine takes to long to complete
a turn, or if it is faulty.
This change urged the ristructuratction of a whole set of classes,
from the genetic engnine (in which I added the block() method), the
environment, the population and the agent.
In the enviroment, a spare_pop member variable has been added;
at the beginning of a turn, a (deep) copy of the population is saved,
and can be restored with the reset() method (formerly it was useless,
now it is used to restore the environment status of the previous turn).
Population and agent have been provided with a copy() method;
also, accordingly changes have been made to the serialization
methods.

The changes have been tested, and seem to work fine, but a
deeper test is needed.

------------------------
Time sharing is implemented through command "slim" (set limit) which
takes a real number between 1 and 100. If the number is 100, time
sharing limit is disabled, else, a control thread is started; the
control thread has the duty to monitorize the activity of the main thread.
This method is not very precise, but it works.

Fixed never ending loop in read from network dropped connections. Now
a connection can be safely closed either by command quit or by
dropping tcp/ip network.
------------------------- END OF CVS COMMIT

Now that we have a strong blockade command (rset) and time sharing
capabilities, we can begin to start thinking how we want to implement the
broadcast of populations.

I have some idea about it, And I will post them tomorrow.

To get the latest updates, enter your working geneticd directory, log a usual
and use the "update" CVS command. Then autoconf, automake, configure and
compile. And have fun!

2002 will be the year of widespread genetic based AI all over the internet. 
Wanna play with us?

Merry Christmas and a happy new AI year.
Giancarlo