Thursday 

Room 4 

13:40 - 14:40 

(UTC+02

Talk (60 min)

Tight Genes: Intro to Genetic Algorithms

Yes, that's right, geneTic, not geneRic. Genetic algorithms are a way to "evolve" solutions to a problem, similar to real-world biological evolution.

AI

This often reveals great solutions that humans probably would never have thought of, such as the twisty NASA ST5 spacecraft antenna, developed by a genetic algorithm in 2006!

This talk will explain the concept and its terms, and then walk you through some examples, including creating a simple generic genetic-algorithm "runner", and multiple algorithms for it to run, such as a "knapsack" problem, characters to fit Dungeons & Dragons classes, and mead recipes to yield specified levels of sweetness and strength.

Dave Aronson

Dave is a semi-retired software development consultant (writing code *and* giving advice about it), with 37 years of professional experience in a wide variety of languages, systems, frameworks, techniques, domains, etc. He is the T. Rex of Codosaurus, LLC (his one-person consulting firm, which explains how he can get such a cool title, at https://www.Codosaur.us/) near Washington, DC, USA. His main focus in software lately is to spread the gospel of quality, including defining what that even means, and talking about techniques to achieve it. In his spare time, he makes mead and teaches others how.