News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
[deleted]
Re:Enough Machine Learning to Make Hacker News Readable Agai... by erokar on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @07:43PM (#7713223)
> They are very prone to getting stuck in local minima.

That's quite a generalization. A GA's tendency to get stuck in local minima can be mitigated by adjusting population size, selection method/size and rate of mutation -- i.e. increase the randomness of the search.

Re:Enough Machine Learning to Make Hacker News Readable Agai... by mendicantB on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @08:23PM (#7713342)
This is not a good generalization. I've usually only seen this issue with optimization problems when:

1) You haven't played with parameters 2) Implementation is not correct (usually the case with genetic algos, since it requires a reasonable amount of domain expertise vs say GD)

Re:Enough Machine Learning to Make Hacker News Readable Agai... by mendicantB on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @08:53PM (#7713430)
Copped out when called out. Deleted comment said GAs were bad search algos and tend to get stuck at local minima.
Re:Enough Machine Learning to Make Hacker News Readable Agai... by bmh100 on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @07:36PM (#7713202)
What evidence is informing your opinion that genetic algorithms are a bad search algorithm? What makes you say that they are very prone to getting stuck in local minima? Do you think they suffer from local minima more than, say, gradient descent?