Genetic Algorithm Specification

This document contains the API specification for the JAVA and C++ based Genetic Algorithm packages that are a part of OpenAI.

Persistence and Transmissibility

Each class must be XML-able. Each class at the API level must have the ability to be initialized via an XML-style character stream. Each class at the API level must have the ability to write out its state into an XML-style character stream. This XML'ed data must contain all relevant information to reconstructing a copy of the original object. The format of the stream written must be compatibile with the XML format of the initialization stream. All implementing languages' (currently JAVA and C++) XML format must be compatibile. An optional tag specifying the language and version must be handled by the class being initialized. Initially, this will most likely be ignored, but will be utilized with future releases to ensure backwards-compatibility. Ideally, this would be in only the top-level encapsulating initialization structure within the XML to reduce redundant data (and some network bandwidth). The writing of this tag by a particular class should be done from the time of the first full release. The format of this tag is still TBD.

Each class may optionally (but is strongly encouraged to) implement a method to save/transmit its state and re-initialize from this saved/transmitted state in a "native" form. The goal here is to have a more optimal mode of transmission for "migrating" an object from one machine to another and take up less disk space as a persistent object but using the same version and language of the transmitted/persistent object. Later versions of these packages will extend this functionality to allow cross-language/version/platform exploits of this "native" communication. For JAVA, this may be a serialized instance of the class, but it would be preferred to have both serialization available and a stream that could be used for other languages.

All functionality that may vary by implementation must have the ability to be overridden. b.A default behavior should be supplied that is either the most common implementation or the simplest implementation.

There must be an MT-safe version of all classes/methods/functions available at the API level. From the view of the application developer using these packages, all function/method calls must be able to be treated as though they are atomic. It will be allowed, however, to have two implementations of a particular class/method/function - one that is MT-safe and one that is not for the purposes of speed within a single-threaded process/application. At the time of this writing, we will leave this up the developers of the packages to determine at what level the separation between MT-safe and speed-optimized code will be made.

JAVA "Core" classes must be in the package net.openai.ai.ga. Events must be in the package net.openai.ai.ga.event. Listeners and Adapters must be in the package net.openai.ai.ga.event. All classes must implement the Serializable interface.
C++ "Core" classes must be in the namespace openai::ai::ga. Events must be in the namespace openai::ai::ga::event. Listeners and Adapters must be in the namespace openai::ai::ga::event.