
A Visual Guide to Evolution Strategies - hardmaru
http://blog.otoro.net/2017/10/29/visual-evolution-strategies/
======
peheje
“Wall clock comparison. Instead of looking at the raw number of states seen,
one can argue that the most important metric to look at is the wall clock
time: how long (in number of seconds) does it take to solve a given problem?
This quantity ultimately dictates the achievable speed of iteration for a
researcher. Since ES requires negligible communication between workers, we
were able to solve one of the hardest MuJoCo tasks (a 3D humanoid) using 1,440
CPUs across 80 machines in only 10 minutes. As a comparison, in a typical
setting 32 A3C workers on one machine would solve this task in about 10
hours.” [https://blog.openai.com/evolution-
strategies/](https://blog.openai.com/evolution-strategies/)

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HugThem
I would _love_ to see this with a more complicated search space. The two
examples are too easy to climb.

Would be really interesting to see how the different algorithms travel through
a landscape where it is hard to find the optimum.

And to make it perfect: Put information about the performance below each
visualization.

~~~
tehsauce
Near the bottom he does show the results of running it on 100-D Rastrigin (and
mnist before that) with stats and plots. Or do you mean something more complex
even than that?

~~~
HugThem
Well, the point of the guide is the nice 2-D visualization. Which he cannot do
for the 100-D problem of course. It would be nice to make the same guide but
with a harder 2-D landscape.

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hardmaru
The next article in the series, Evolving Stable Strategies, is also up.

[http://blog.otoro.net/2017/11/12/evolving-stable-
strategies/](http://blog.otoro.net/2017/11/12/evolving-stable-strategies/)

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maaaats
For me the biggest advantage is that ES often lends itself better to multi
objective optimization. Discussed here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15584858](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15584858)

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snackematician
80s are so in right now, first neural networks, now genetic algorithms :P

~~~
sgt101
what next... a discovery of the limitations of machine learning?

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tomcam
I’m scared by what the Japanese are doing with Prolog…

~~~
sgt101
Actually the advances in logic programming are quite compelling; answer set
programming is pretty cool!

I'm not sure why it's having such a small impact though - perhaps the shear
number of low cost programmers available means that no one has to use it.
Although I would have thought that high cost programmers equipped with tools
like these could better justify their pay.

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augustk
Without Javascript the mathematical expressions are not displayed. This makes
some parts of the text incomprehensible.

~~~
faceplanted
Yeah, but if you just casually don't use Javascript on the web, you're not
worth catering to.

~~~
augustk
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement)

~~~
faceplanted
Yes, I know what progressive enhancement is, my point is that it's not worth
the effort of starting from literally just html and CSS to cater for the
people so unwilling to work with you that they don't even have the second most
basic web tooling enabled.

And what kind of cost-benefit analysis is _ever_ going to tell you that it's
worth catering for the less than 0.5% of people who turn off JavaScript?

~~~
augustk
"As long as you're fine with the site completely failing because the browser
is too old, or too new, or the user's bandwidth is too constrained, or the
server hiccups, or a firewall's security policy blocks it, or a dependency
goes sideways, or you accidentally drop a semicolon somewhere, then sure,"
says consultant and author Eric Meyer, "it's OK. What you build won't be a
part of the web continuum, and it will be needlessly fragile, but that's a
choice you can make."

[http://www.creativebloq.com/features/is-it-okay-to-build-
sit...](http://www.creativebloq.com/features/is-it-okay-to-build-sites-that-
rely-on-javascript)

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netmonk
I like it :P

