Will Smart

Please Note

This person can no longer be contacted through the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington

Biography

Will Smart (henceforth "I") is/am a Comp Sci, AI PhD student at Vic as of 2005.

My PhD topic is the study of Genetic Programming (GP) via study of schemata that arise in simulated evolution.

GP is an evolutionary algorithm, in which we attempt to bridge the "smart" computer gap by splitting the difficult process of creating intelligence to the easier process of measuring intelligence, and the well understood process of evolution. I.e. instead of arduously creating a smart program (endpoint), we pair evolution (power to move) with a fitness function (direction toward endpoint) to iteratively move a random initial population of programs (easily found point) to that endpoint.

Schemata are patterns in programs. If you will excuse the analogy: if programs are people, schemata are genes (roughly).

I am interested in complex forms of schemata in actual evolution. Also, I do a sort of global search of all such patterns.

Aside from that, I am interested in a veritable multitude of things, which I do in my off time, including:

Robotics:

As a simple example, I made the software for this: http://blip.tv/file/1450702

And have though up many wonderous machines, which I am slowly materializing.

Graphics:

Three D stuff. Used to be a VJ. Real-time raytracing of GP programs is a fav

etc..