RTFM ?? Can I save island to disk until server returns?

[Doc Toe]

Hi there,

The DHEP server appears to be down, and naturally, my island has been crunching away all alone since then. However, I realllly need to reboot the machine the island is on. Naturally, I do not want to lose this island... all 300,000 and counting, generations of it.

Can I gracefully exit/save this and restart it later?

Thanks,
DT

[prokaryote]

Hi Doc Toe,

I'm not sure that if you reboot that you won't lose your current work. Unfortunately, U of S seems to be having major server issues and I don't know if Miguel is able to access this forum. Could try to e-mail at this addy: M.M.Garvie@sussex.ac.uk.

Would be a good question to add to the FAQ list on the home page.

prok

[michaelgarvie]

To save the best individual in your island you can select the output from the latest generation at the console. This looks something like:
P0, Gen: 123123 Top: F<f>1.0.....Avg: 0.9121
You can then send me this by email or through the forum and I'll seed it back in.

[Scrambled Eggs]

I've just started running DHEP as a Windows service. Am I incorrect in believing that everything is lost if my computer is turned off for any reason? I see no files regularly recording the latest state and best results. Because of thunderstorms, I regularly turn off my computer. I would like to turn it off without losing important data. Can this be implemented?

[michaelgarvie]

Dear Scrambled Eggs,

All is not lost as your data is saved on the server, this will be picked up as soon as you reconnect to it. The client is implemented to be ultra-light and ultra-secure so no writing on the disk is even allowed to the Java Virtual Machine.

Cheers,
Miguel

[Scrambled Eggs]

You're assuming that I'm constantly connected. I'm not - I use a modem, so my question stands.

[michaelgarvie]

You can find more help on using a modem with DHEP here:
http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/mmg20/dhe/faq.php#modem

But you're right, if you're on a modem you probably want to reset your computer just after you've connected to the internet.

However if you see that your island has found a solution better than the best found so far ( http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/mmg20/dhe/statsGoal.php ) and you have to restart your PC without connecting, you can do the following:

Copy the genotype and send it to me by email. You can find it wrapped in <g>...</g> tags in both the console and the GUI. You'll get the same credit as if it had happened through the system.

:cheers: Miguel