Printable View
How come the java client (at least in 9x and linux) do not redraw the console by themselves. It's obvious that the graphics are being drawn, they're just never exposed unless you do something to manually expose them by events from the windowing system. Is this a bug or is this how it's supposed to work? Wouldn't it make sense to only call the graphics routines every certain time interval if they're not meant to be exposed as new circuits are tried?
Every generation doesn't make sense since there could be 200 a second.
Every n seconds may be a waste of processing if you're not watching it.
You can force a repaint by clicking on the split panel thingys.
I personally don't feel the need for a gui and always keep it minimized -- just looking at the console output works for me.
An ncurses frontend would be nice though, so I don't have to parse xml in my head.
Ok, so we have manual redraws. but the program itself is still creating the "pixmaps" for each and every circuit isn't it? Or does the "expose" signal start a function that actually does create the pixmap. In gtk programs i've written the expose event always just exposes a pixmap that i've already written. If the pixmaps are being created on demand then i dont have a problem with this method of showing the current circuit.
However, I do think we can make the textual data more understandable instead of having everything as variables. Like instead of saying < p0 > is this or that we can have the name for p0 in plain english and have all this data on a newline instead of one after another. This really shouldn't be any more cpu intensive than the output already is for console and in the gui. Also, the hex data for the circuit isn't very useful as output and it takes up the most space making the output seem even more hard to easily follow. I think just the fitness, avg fitness , p0, p1, p2 as textual output is good.
As for the gui, Yes we have all done truth tables and if we wanna try we could pick some useful information out of the gui but I think i speak for everyone when i say that nobody is going to do that. I close the gui on start and so do most other people. The only way the gui is going to display visual data that people will find useful is if it outputs gates the way everyone knows them.
Circuit is only rendered upon repaint event, so nothing wasted.
I guess I could improve the console output, I'll put it on my list.
However it is important to have the genotype printed just in case your island finds a really good solution and for some reason can't connect to the server. Then you can recover the best individual by copying and pasting.