LaTex and Genetic Algorithms

Spent a lot of time this week getting the paper ready for the conference. I decided to use LaTeX as the conference put an outline file out as .tex. I've only had brief foray in using LaTex, so formatting the paper had a steep learning curve. I do have to say however that it was quite fruitful. I now appreciate the power of LaTeX and will probably use it again for further papers.

Anyway, moving past the paper, I started working on the shochicken. Much of the work was re-familiarizing myself with the research I performed last year. I am really quite excited about this part of the project! Since a lot of the work has been more laying out the foundations, there isn't really much to report on progress with the shoechicken.

I did have what could turn out to be quite a good idea though. We'd assumed a fairly traditional machine learning approach for shoechicken. The system would employ some kind of reinforcement learning to build a user model. However, it may be a good idea to look into genetic algorithmic techniques. We could let the Shochickens breed!!! Sounds a little crazy, but there could be a great deal of merit to this approach. Only just thought about it, but will research the topic with some zest over the next week or so and let you all know how it goes!