Bio

Carlos is an Biology undergraduate student in the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico with interests in systems biology, complexity and ants. His undergraduate dissertation is about the effect of auto-regulation in small genetic regulatory network models, focusing on their stability. When not working on his dissertation, he takes care of a few ant colonies, some of which he started from a single queen and now are a few years old, and, using nature as inspiration, creates jewelry.

Computational Essay: Why are bugs so strong?

Project: Evolving randomly generated programs

Goal

Develop a method to create randomly generated programs and to evolve them to do interesting things.

Summary of Results

First, I developed a method to create and mutate random programs. Some of the functions I employed are Reverse, Sort, Accumulate, MinMax, Union, Join and Riffle. After that, I created a fitness function that measures how well a program creates a list of increasing integers. Then I implemented a genetic algorithm to evolve the programs and analyzed the results.

Future Work

• Refine and increase the set of functions used in random programs.
• Use different sets of functions that work with different objects.
• Change the goal (fitness function) so that the programs evolve to do other interesting things with pseudorandom sequences, the Fibonacci sequence, prime numbers, etc.