Progress with my PhD was going very well until yesterday, when I discovered a massive bug in my genetic algorithm that resulted in the insertion of misshaped, invalid individuals in the population.

The ancient Spartans used to practice a form of eugenics by casting weak or malformed babies into a gorge. My programme has a virtual gorge into which are cast the products of unfortunate mutations, leaving the main population filled with nice, healthy individuals (candidate designs for buildings). But apparently, the part of the programme responsible for disposing the results of teratogenesis was compassionately allowing the little monsters to crawl back into the population.

It took me several frustrating hours and a lot of exciting detective work (at least it seemed that way at the time; gimme a break) to find the portion of the code that allowed this. And when I did, it felt good. It felt like I had been out hunting, and I shot myself a moose. A really tiny moose. Hiding among tons of other tiny moose-like objects that weren’t moose. With a dart, from a mile away. Coders would probably recognise this feeling. It’s a very primal sense of success, like killing a moose, or beating a male rival and getting to mate with the only available healthy female.

The problem is, the fixed algorithm is much slower, I have to run all my test cases again to get new results, and the deadline is fast approaching. Rough times ahead.

If you haven’t seen Momus’s comment in the previous entry, be advised that his wonderful site is now at imomus.com.