it3708 - bio-inspired artificial intelligence

assignment 1

this project is written in odin and uiua (uiua-plot) with nix for dependency management.

with nix installed, just run

$ nix run

and it will run through the pipeline. it will generate data/image files in output/.

i implement a genetic algorithm to solve the binary knapsack problem.

this is done by

first generating a population of individuals/chromosomes, modeled as bit_arrays for memory performance.
then continue for some fixed amount of generations
- calculate the fitness of each chromosome in the population by calculating the distance to the capacity. to avoid negative fitness values, chromosomes that overshoot the capacity are penalized.
- create offspring by
  - selecting two parents using a tournament selection
  - then performing single point crossover between the parents to create two children
  - then mutate each child with random bit-flip mutations.
- create a new population via elitism survivor selection
repeat

each generation, the fitness value maximum, minimum and mean values are logged in output/data.csv.

this data is read through uiua src/plot.ua to plot the data to output/plot.png.