ack to .ghx?
This is in relation to a discussion I've been having with David Rutten & Scott Davidson about GH consuming memory in a relatively large GH definition (~. I think what I've learned from this is that one should limit the size of the GH file, or put some incremental stops in the definition to limit the length of calculations that it runs at once. Is this a valid conclusion?
The GH file we're talking about is 7Mb & the Rhino file is about 120Mb, but when working w/ the GH def. I try to only keep about 2 curves turned on.
Here's a summary of the discussion:
Hi Mike,thanks for sending it over. I've been fiddling with the file for about 10 minutes and it climbed from 1.7 GB to 1.9GB, but then I've been switching previews on which means more meshes get calculated so you'd expect a higher memory consumption. It is possible we're leaking memory, but if you're working for hours on end, memory fragmentation might also explain part of the increase. Basically, memory gets fragmented just like disks get fragmented after prolonged use, difference is that memory cannot be defragmented unless you restart the application and allow it to start with a clean slate. I'll try and find any leaks we may have missed in the past.Goodwill,David
──────────── David Rutten
On 09/03/2011 06:19, Mike Calvino wrote:
Thanks very much David for the quick response. I've attached the files zipped. I can't figure out what's doing it. After working in the file for awhile, the memory usage in the Windows Task Manager climbs . . . it's gotten to 1.57+Gb before I exited GH & Rhino5Wip & let it dissipate, then restart & work for awhile before it does it again. It probably takes like 4 or 5 hours before it gets that high. That's the highest it's gotten, & that only happened while I was working in a Rhino file that had all of the elements baked into it - turned off at least, but it still climbed to 1.57+Gb. It seems to climbs when you work in the file & move around in both the GH def. & the Rhino file. Like turn on a few of the Extr components at the right end of the "StandareRibExtuder" groups, you can watch the MemUsage go up, but when you turn them off, it does not go down. - goes up fast at this point. Maybe I need to figure out how to do the definition with fewer components, I'm sure that's part of it, but I must confess, I think I'm still early on in the learning curve.I really hope that this is not operator error on my part & I do apologize up front if it is. I have done a disk cleanup, I have tried excluding .3dm & .ghx files from my NOD32 antivirus, no change. I hope you can find something.Let me know if you have any trouble with the files.See if you find anything & please let me know . . . thanks!Cheers! --Mike CalvinoCalvino Architecture Studio, inc.www.calvinodesign.com
…
can work in any node of a given hierarchy tree (loaded in your work session) by making the node "active". "Nodes" can be other things as well (like workplane, clip definitions etc).
Why to do that weird thing? Well, think any design being "flat" > meaning that all objects are placed in a single file (and in a single layer). Not that good > although the items are present you barely can handle them (because power is nothing without control, he he).
Let's go one step further: we can start classifying objects in "groups" (like a directories/files organization in any O/S). This means, in MCAD speak, creating assemblies (a void thing kinda like a directory) that contain components/entities (kinda like files).
Several steps further we end up with severely nested "arrangements" of entities (an assembly could be parent of something and child of something else).
For instance, it could be rather obvious the logical classification of a "geodetic" (so to speak) structure like this : a 40000m2 "hangar" defining some thematic park.
I mean : a void master that owns 4 equal void segment sets that own 4 "legs" that own various geodesic structural members + cables + membranes + you name it etc etc.
Each "leg" owns the concrete base (Shared) and a rather complex set of objects.
Notice that some tensile membrane "fixture" combos (see above)...act as perimeter light fixtures as well...meaning that the membrane tension plate may could be a child of a void "light" parent...or may could be a "stand alone" assembly etc etc.
These arrangements can be internal (belonging in, say, a x node within the current active file) or external (belonging in a y node within another file). If they deal with the same (topologically speaking) object they define clusters of Shared entities (or variations)- where only the view transformation matrix changes (in the simple scenario, he he). For instance the disk shown above is a Shared Assembly that owns the bolts, the plates, the tension member etc etc. Selective Instancing allows modifying some attributes without affecting the topology (i.e. the geometry).
The whole (terrible) mess is controlled by some tree like "dialog" (in Catia is "transparent") that is called Structure Browser. By controlled I mean (1) display/display mode with regard any tree member combo/selection set (assembly and/or component) in any View (2) clip state control (3) active status (for modifications/variations) (4) workplane control (5) drag and drop ownership control (6) ....
Now...what if I would chan…
this occasion, but it could be converted for DT in no time). Requires some minutes more as regards ... some things, but the usual update is due to some days.
Bad news: it's C#
Good news: User's Manual :
1. That thing (the C#, not me) after sorting (in a "sequential way", so tho speak) the panels (their order was chaotic) allows you to start the massacre by locating a focus of interest (and the user controllable +/- Range derived from it).2. The Range is variable (obviously) and takes care not to exceed the indices of the panel list (OK, that's elementary).
3. If you click the right button (Sadistic Q: where is it? he he) things are deleted and a new constantly self-updating list is your new List. Thus the massacre of panels is totally controllable. An autoZoom thing is also included (free of charge, but it's a bit nerve braking). Zoom factor is variable as well.
4. Then you move over (via the index slider) and start the massacre again. Notice the change of Range.
5. If you turn begin to false (initialization) and then begin to true > start all over again.
6. The other C# thing allows you to increment the index slider in a rather more convenient way. It's a bit weird: it uses delegates (A delegate is an object that knows how to call a method) and events (An event is a construct that exposes just the subset of delegate features required for the broadcaster/subscriber model - but don't ask what this means, he he) in order to talk with your slider (with a defined NickName) and perform the required value control.
NOTE: without realizing it you've just (indirectly) asked one of the most important questions even exposed in this Noble Forum. I hear you : what question? Well ... wait some days for the mother of all threads: "Total control in collections on a per Item basis"
may the Force (the dark option) be with you (and me)
best, Peter…
Rubicon (ii.e. some programming language [I would strongly recommend C#] > the Dark Side > years of pain + tears > hell or heaven?).
Back to that pile or worms of yours (I hate "simple" cases, he he).
0. if you want rounded lips ... Styrofoam is the only solution (+ sanding [buy a mask and some decent cigars ... path is long and hilly]). if not > goto 5/6.
1. by what means you think that you can shape Styrofoam? Do you have access to some CNC foam cutter? Or the only tools that you have are ... 2 hands and a knife? (or a thermal cutter). Accuracy is a BIG issue here: chances are that panels won't "fit". Solution is available in the forthcoming V3.
2. male "protrusions" on Styrofoam is kinda 3rd marriage > AVOID at any cost > this would end up in tears.
3. female ones are safe ... thus we need a proper "insert stripe" that must be compatible with the Styrofoam adhesive and strong enough to hold the pieces until the glue cures (it takes time, there's no instant Styrofoam adhesives around). Maybe aluminum (hard to cut by hand) or balsa (very expensive) or plywood (best option).
4. Some CNC foam cutters they can't shape the female "crevices" > be prepared (a thermal tool may(?) cut the mustard).
Note: panels made with Styrofoam look miserable because reality and theory differ. They also look miserable as well (and kitsch and miserable).
5. making the panels with (marine) plywood ... well this yields far superior accuracy and therefor aesthetics but (a) yields max panel thickness constrains, (b) introduces max panel dimensions constrains (c) yields packing issues [waste material] and (d) requires a totally different "connection" approach: it doesn't make sense to do some female crevice ... unless the plywood is very thick (expensive + heavy).
Note: Designing (pro option) self supporting "rib" reinforced sandwich composite panels ... well this is a bit far and away from what you can handle at present time.
So ... I've suspended the male/female thingy until you decide the final policy: it's the material/detailing that should dictate the method(s) AND the whole design and not the other way.
This is what we call bottom-top design approach (dinosaur Architects follow the top-bottom: disastrous + naive + naive + naive + avoid).
6. Plan ZZTop: make a stand alone autonomous perimeter frame per panel (marine plywood: imagine "thickening" these abstract beams shown inwards per panel) then join these frames by means of bolts (easy) and fill the "gaps" with Styrofoam (hmm). Note: you can reinforce the frames by a variety of means (say: a secondary "beam" sub-structure) achieving a rather elegant all overall solution.
This is the best solution by roughly 666 miles.
…
he Cordyceps. Maybe some of you find this helpful/useful.
So basically, the Cordyceps is a physical module with 4 knobs and 1 slider. The knobs give an output between 1 and 1000, while the physical slider outputs 0-359. And of course, for this physical module I wrote a plugin to communicate with it. The knobs are intended to be the variables that modifies the design, while the physical slider is intended to be connected to the camera component.
Here I will put up "the recipe" for all to make their own module. You will be able to download the plugin as well.
Please send me a message if you want the 3D-files for the knobs, the box and slider knob. They've been made to directly 3D-print.
Plugin:
https://github.com/zakadjeb/Cordyceps/blob/master/Cordyceps/Cordyce...
Code for Arduino IDE:
https://github.com/zakadjeb/Cordyceps/blob/master/Arduino/_Arduino_...
What you need:
1x - Arduino (Leonardo, UNO or whatever)
4x - Potentiometers
1x - Sliding potentiometer
1x - Breadboard
Bundle of jump wires.
1. So, a potentiometer is a variable resistor, which is basically a component that changes the resistance between the voltage and the ground.
If A is supplied with 5V then B must be connected to Ground. The W will give "read" the resistance, and thus should be placed in Analog input (A0-A5) on the Arduino. The slider potentiometer works the same way.
2. Now connect the 4 pots to each their Analog input. The slider is supposed to be in A4. So to make sure:
A0: Knob1
A1: Knob2
A2: Knob3
A3: Knob4
A4: Slider
3. Now it's time to connect the voltage! Using the breadboard, the voltage can be sent through 1 line, the Ground as well. It should be quite easy to connect them.
4. Now, download the Arduino IDE and copy-paste the code I supplied above. In the IDE, you need to let it know which Arduino you're working with, and which port is should send the script.
5. Almost there. Download the plugin. Open the port you're using through the plugin. Set Start to True and the Cordyceps should be within you.
This recipe will be updated!
Let me know if there are any issues.
// Zakaria Djebbara…
he Cordyceps. Maybe some of you find this helpful/useful.
So basically, the Cordyceps is a physical module with 4 knobs and 1 slider. The knobs give an output between 1 and 1000, while the physical slider outputs 0-359. And of course, for this physical module I wrote a plugin to communicate with it. The knobs are intended to be the variables that modifies the design, while the physical slider is intended to be connected to the camera component.
Here I will put up "the recipe" for all to make their own module. You will be able to download the plugin as well.
Please send me a message if you want the 3D-files for the knobs, the box and slider knob. They've been made to directly 3D-print.
Plugin:
https://github.com/zakadjeb/Cordyceps/blob/master/Cordyceps/Cordyce...
Code for Arduino IDE:
https://github.com/zakadjeb/Cordyceps/blob/master/Arduino/_Arduino_...
What you need:
1x - Arduino (Leonardo, UNO or whatever)
4x - Potentiometers
1x - Sliding potentiometer
1x - Breadboard
Bundle of jump wires.
1. So, a potentiometer is a variable resistor, which is basically a component that changes the resistance between the voltage and the ground.
If A is supplied with 5V then B must be connected to Ground. The W will give "read" the resistance, and thus should be placed in Analog input (A0-A5) on the Arduino. The slider potentiometer works the same way.
2. Now connect the 4 pots to each their Analog input. The slider is supposed to be in A4. So to make sure:
A0: Knob1
A1: Knob2
A2: Knob3
A3: Knob4
A4: Slider
3. Now it's time to connect the voltage! Using the breadboard, the voltage can be sent through 1 line, the Ground as well. It should be quite easy to connect them.
4. Now, download the Arduino IDE and copy-paste the code I supplied above. In the IDE, you need to let it know which Arduino you're working with, and which port is should send the script.
5. Almost there. Download the plugin. Open the port you're using through the plugin. Set Start to True and the Cordyceps should be within you.
This recipe will be updated!
Let me know if there are any issues.
// Zakaria Djebbara…
new component "OSM 3D roof"):
2) Simplified 3D roads can be created by using the network of OSM polylines (through new component "OSM 3D road"):
3) 3D forest.Up until now, Gismo supported generating a single 3d tree whenever such tree was present in openstreetmap.org database. Now it is possible to generate 3d trees in forest areas, by randomly positioning the 3d trees (through new component "OSM 3D forest"):
4) Boolean 3d shapes.Gismo's "OSM 3D" component generates shapes as parts: for example, if a building has irregular shapes across its height, they will all be created individually. Trying to merge them with Grasshopper's "Solid Union" component can sometimes fail.New Gismo "Rhino Boolean Union" components tries to overcome this issue by using a much better Rhino version of this command.
5) Library of common GIS color palettes (gradients).A single component containing 22 of the common color palettes used in GIS applications as ArcGIS and QGIS. For example: elevation, aspect, precipitation...
6) Url to location.Thanks to idea by Alex Ng, it is possible to extract location from a link of the following map websites: Openstreetmap, google maps, bing maps, wego.here, waze:
Version 0.0.3 can be downloaded from here:
https://github.com/stgeorges/gismo/zipball/master
Example files from here:
https://github.com/stgeorges/gismo/tree/master/examples
New suggestions, testing and bug reports are welcome!!…
Added by djordje to Gismo at 1:39am on January 29, 2019
r." I'm sorry to hear that, I take the interface and ease-of-use rather seriously so this sounds like a fundamental failure on my part. On the other hand, Grasshopper isn't supposed to be on a par with most other 3D programs. It is emphatically not meant for manual/direct modelling. If you would normally tackle a problem by drawing geometry by hand, Grasshopper is not (and should never be advertised as) a good alternative."What in other programs is a dialog box, is 8 or 10 components strung together in grasshopper. The wisdom for this I often hear among the grasshopper community is that this allows for parametric design."Grasshopper ships with about 1000 components (rounded to the nearest power of ten). I'm adding more all the time, either because new functionality has been exposed in the Rhino SDK or because a certain component makes a lot of sense to a lot of people. Adding pre-canned components that do the same as '8 or 10 components strung together' for the heck of it will balloon the total number of components everyone has to deal with. If you find yourself using the same 8 to 10 components together all the time, then please mention it on this forum. A lot of the currently existing components have been added because someone asked for it."[...] has a far cleaner and more intuitive interface. So does SolidWorks, Inventor, CATIA, NX, and a bunch of others."Again, GH was not designed to be an alternative to these sort of modellers. I don't like referring to GH as 'parameteric' as that term has been co-opted by relational modellers. I prefer to use 'algorithmic' instead. The idea behind parameteric seems to be that one models by hand, but every click exists within a context, and when the context changes the software figures out where to move the click to. The idea behind algorithmic is that you don't model by hand.This is not to say there is no value in the parametric approach. Obviously it is a winning strategy and many people love to use it. We have considered adding some features to GH that would make manual modelling less of a chore and we would still very much like to do so. However this is such a large chunk of work that we have to be very careful about investing the time. Before I start down this road I want to make sure that the choice I'm making is not 'lame-ass algorithmic modeller with some lame-ass parametrics tacked on' vs. 'kick-ass algorithmic modeller with no parametrics tacked on'.
Visual Programming.I'm not exactly sure I understand your grievance here, but I suspect I agree. The visual part is front and centre at the moment and it should remain there. However we need to improve upon it and at the same time give programmers more tools to achieve what they want.
Context sensitivity."There is no reason a program in 2014 should allow me to make decisions that will not work. For example, if a component input is in all cases incompatible with another component's output, I shouldn't be able to connect them."Unfortunately it's not as simple as that. Whether or not a conversion between two data types makes sense is often dependent on the actual values. If you plug a list of curves into a Line component, none of them may be convertible. Should I therefore not allow this connection to be made? What if there is a single curve that could be converted to a line? What if you want to make the connection now, but only later plan to add some convertible curves to the data? What you made the connection back when it was valid, but now it's no longer valid, wouldn't it be weird if there was a connection you couldn't make again?I've started work on GH2 and one of the first things I'm writing now is the new data-conversion logic. The goal this time around is to not just try and convert type A into type B, but include information about what sort of conversion was needed (straightforward, exotic, far-fetched. etc.) and information regarding why that type was assigned.You are right that under some conditions, we can be sure that a conversion will always fail. For example connecting a Boolean output with a Curve input. But even there my preferred solution is to tell people why that doesn't make sense rather than not allowing it in the first place.
Sliders."I think they should be optional."They are optional."The “N” should turn into the number if set."What if you assign more than one integer? I think I'd rather see a component with inputs 'N', 'P' and 'X' rather than '5', '8' and '35.7', but I concede that is a personal preference."But if I plug it into something that'll only accept a 1, a 2, or a 3, that slider should self set accordingly."Agreed.
Components."Give components a little “+” or a drawer on the bottom or something that by clicking, opens the component into something akin to a dialog box. This should give access to all of the variables in the component. I shouldn't have to r-click on each thing on a component to do all of the settings."I was thinking of just zooming in on a component would eventually provide easier ways to access settings and data."Could some of these items disappear if they are contextually inappropriate or gray out if they're unlikely?"It's almost impossible for me to know whether these things are 'unlikely' in any given situation. There are probably some cases where a suggestion along the lines of "Hey, this component is about to run 40,524 times. It seems like it would make sense to Graft the 'P' input." would be useful.
Integration."Why isn't it just live geometry?"This is an unfortunate side-effect of the way the Rhino SDK was designed. Pumping all my geometry through the Rhino document would severely impact performance and memory usage. It also complicates the matter to an almost impossible degree as any command and plugin running in Rhino now has access to 'my' geometry."Maybe add more Rhino functionality to GH. GH has no 3D offset."That's the plan moving forward. A lot of algorithms in Rhino (Make2D, FilletEdge, Shelling, BlendSrf, the list goes on) are not available as part of the public SDK. The Rhino development team is going to try and rectify this for Rhino6 and beyond. As soon as these functions become available I'll start adding them to GH (provided they make sense of course).On the whole I agree that integration needs a lot of work, and it's work that has to happen on both sides of the isle.
Documentation.Absolutely. Development for GH1 has slowed because I'm now working on GH2. We decided that GH1 is 'feature complete', basically to avoid feature creep. GH2 is a ground-up rewrite so it will take a long time until something is ready for testing. During this time, minor additions and of course bug fixes will be available for GH1, but on a much lower frequency.Documentation is woefully inadequate at present. The primer is being updated (and the new version looks great), but for GH2 we're planning a completely new help system. People have been hired to provide the content. With a bit of luck and a lot of work this will be one of the main selling points of GH2.
2D-ness."I know you'll disagree completely, but I'm sticking to this. How else could an omission like offsetsurf happen?"I don't fully disagree. A lot of geometry is either flat or happens inside surfaces. The reason there's no shelling (I'm assuming that's what you meant, there are two Offset Surface components in GH) is because (a) it's a very new feature in Rhino and doesn't work too well yet and (b) as a result of that isn't available to plugins.
Organisation.Agreed. We need to come up with better ways to organise, document, version, share and simplify GH files. GH1 UI is ok for small projects (<100 components) but can't handle more complexity.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the feedback, I really do, but I want to be honest and open about my own plans and where they might conflict with your wishes. Grasshopper is being used far beyond the boundaries of what we expected and it's clear that there are major shortcomings that must be addressed before too long. We didn't get it right with the first version, I don't expect we'll get it completely right with the second version but if we can improve upon the -say- five biggest drawbacks (performance, documentation, organisation, plugin management and no mac version) I'll be a happy puppy.
--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com…
lly it should not make much of a difference - random number generation is not affected, mutation also is not. crossover is a bit more tricky, I use Simulated Binary Crossover (SBX-20) which was introduced already in 1194:
Deb K., Agrawal R. B.: Simulated Binary Crossover for Continuous Search Space, inIITK/ME/SMD-94027, Convenor, Technical Reports, Indian Institue of Technology, Kanpur, India,November 1994
Abst ract. The success of binary-coded gene t ic algorithms (GA s) inproblems having discrete sear ch sp ace largely depends on the codingused to represent the prob lem variables and on the crossover ope ratorthat propagates buildin g blocks from pare nt strings to childrenst rings . In solving optimization problems having continuous searchspace, binary-co ded GAs discr et ize the search space by using a codingof the problem var iables in binary st rings. However , t he coding of realvaluedvari ables in finit e-length st rings causes a number of difficulties:inability to achieve arbit rary pr ecision in the obtained solution , fixedmapping of problem var iab les, inh eren t Hamming cliff problem associatedwit h binary coding, and processing of Holland 's schemata incont inuous search space. Although a number of real-coded GAs aredevelop ed to solve optimization problems having a cont inuous searchspace, the search powers of these crossover operators are not adequate .In t his paper , t he search power of a crossover operator is defined int erms of the probability of creating an arbitrary child solut ion froma given pair of parent solutions . Motivated by t he success of binarycodedGAs in discret e search space problems , we develop a real-codedcrossover (which we call the simulated binar y crossover , or SBX) operatorwhose search power is similar to that of the single-point crossoverused in binary-coded GAs . Simulation results on a number of realvaluedt est problems of varying difficulty and dimensionality suggestt hat the real-cod ed GAs with t he SBX operator ar e ab le to perform asgood or bet t er than binary-cod ed GAs wit h t he single-po int crossover.SBX is found to be particularly useful in problems having mult ip le optimalsolutions with a narrow global basin an d in prob lems where thelower and upper bo unds of the global optimum are not known a priori.Further , a simulation on a two-var iable blocked function showsthat the real-coded GA with SBX work s as suggested by Goldberg
and in most cases t he performance of real-coded GA with SBX is similarto that of binary GAs with a single-point crossover. Based onth ese encouraging results, this paper suggests a number of extensionsto the present study.
7. ConclusionsIn this paper, a real-coded crossover operator has been develop ed bas ed ont he search characte rist ics of a single-point crossover used in binary -codedGAs. In ord er to define the search power of a crossover operator, a spreadfactor has been introduced as the ratio of the absolute differences of thechildren points to that of the parent points. Thereaft er , the probabilityof creat ing a child point for two given parent points has been derived forthe single-point crossover. Motivat ed by the success of binary-coded GAsin problems wit h discrete sear ch space, a simul ated bin ary crossover (SBX)operator has been develop ed to solve problems having cont inuous searchspace. The SBX operator has search power similar to that of the single-po intcrossover.On a number of t est fun ctions, including De Jong's five te st fun ct ions, ithas been found that real-coded GAs with the SBX operator can overcome anumb er of difficult ies inherent with binary-coded GAs in solving cont inuoussearch space problems-Hamming cliff problem, arbitrary pr ecision problem,and fixed mapped coding problem. In the comparison of real-coded GAs wit ha SBX operator and binary-coded GAs with a single-point crossover ope rat or ,it has been observed that the performance of the former is better than thelatt er on continuous functions and the performance of the former is similarto the lat ter in solving discret e and difficult functions. In comparison withanother real-coded crossover operator (i.e. , BLX-0 .5) suggested elsewhere ,SBX performs better in difficult test functions. It has also been observedthat SBX is particularly useful in problems where the bounds of the optimum
point is not known a priori and wher e there are multi ple optima, of whichone is global.Real-coded GAs wit h t he SBX op erator have also been tried in solvinga two-variab le blocked function (the concept of blocked fun ctions was introducedin [10]). Blocked fun ct ions are difficult for real-coded GAs , becauselocal optimal points block t he progress of search to continue towards t heglobal optimal point . The simulat ion results on t he two-var iable blockedfunction have shown that in most occasions , the sea rch proceeds the way aspr edicted in [10]. Most importantly, it has been observed that the real-codedGAs wit h SBX work similar to that of t he binary-coded GAs wit h single-pointcrossover in overcoming t he barrier of the local peaks and converging to t heglobal bas in. However , it is premature to conclude whether real-coded GAswit h SBX op erator can overcome t he local barriers in higher-dimensionalblocked fun ct ions.These results are encour aging and suggest avenues for further research.Because the SBX ope rat or uses a probability distribut ion for choosing a childpo int , the real-coded GAs wit h SBX are one st ep ahead of the binary-codedGAs in te rms of ach ieving a convergence proof for GAs. With a direct probabilist ic relationship between children and parent points used in t his paper,cues from t he clas sical stochast ic optimization methods can be borrowed toachieve a convergence proof of GAs , or a much closer tie between the classicaloptimization methods and GAs is on t he horizon.
In short, according to the authors my SBX operator using real gene values is as good as older ones specially designed for discrete searches, and better in continuous searches. SBX as far as i know meanwhile is a standard general crossover operator.
But:
- there might be better ones out there i just havent seen yet. please tell me.
- besides tournament selection and mutation, crossover is just one part of the breeding pipeline. also there is the elite management for MOEA which is AT LEAST as important as the breeding itself.
- depending on the problem, there are almost always better specific ways of how to code the mutation and the crossover operators. but octopus is meant to keep it general for the moment - maybe there's a way for an interface to code those things yourself..!?
2) elite size = SPEA-2 archive size, yes. the rate depends on your convergence behaviour i would say. i usually start off with at least half the size of the population, but mostly the same size (as it is hard-coded in the new version, i just realize) is big enough.
4) the non-dominated front is always put into the archive first. if the archive size is exceeded, the least important individual (the significant strategy in SPEA-2) are truncated one by one until the size is reached. if it is smaller, the fittest dominated individuals are put into the elite. the latter happens in the beginning of the run, when the front wasn't discovered well yet.
3) yes it is. this is a custom implementation i figured out myself. however i'm close to have the HypE algorithm working in the new version, which natively has got the possibility to articulate perference relations on sets of solutions.
…
and where the decimal place should be.
The reason it only shows the first 5 numbers that make up 1,000,000 is because anything smaller than 100 is considered insignificant when talking about 1 million. Think of it like this if 1 million represents an Olympic size swimming pool then 10 would represent the volume of a full tank of petrol for an average family car. You would have to stand there for an extremely long time to fill up the pool from a petrol pump.
It's important to know that these insignificant digits are still there for the purpose of calculations but are just not being displayed.
There are times when you may want to display these numbers in a format that makes more sense, for these occasions we can use the Format() function.
Format() Function
For versions BEFORE 0.9.0001 the VB Format Function is available through the Expression Components found on the Math Tab > Script Panel
Either by using the F input* or the Expressions Editor found on the Context Menu you can apply a format mask to the x input.
* except FxN
Anatomy of the formatting function above:
Format(..............................) <-- VB function
Format("........................."....) <-- Display String
Format("{0....................}"....) <-- Place Holder for first variable
Format("{0:0.000000000}"...) <-- Format Mask for 9 decimal places
Format("{0:0.000000000}", x) <-- Variable
This can be applied to points and their components:
For versions AFTER 0.9.0001 there is a dedicated Format Component or you can use the Expressions Components successor Evaluate.
For more information on the tags used in the Format Function see these links.
Standard formatting tags Custom formatting tags
WARNING:
If you format a number to be displayed in this way it becomes a string and will no longer have the complete Real number available for calculations. Always use the input to the format function for further requirements in calculations.…