Thursday 3 March 2011

the daily grind - 3/3/11

Spent the day writing code. Partly successful, partly unsuccessful. Coz, I've implemented most of what I wanted to implement. There are a few more features to do, but they shouldn't take time.

But I'm stuck at generating graphs. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a way around it.

The problem is as follows:

1) Since my procedure is stochastic, I have to run several simulations and then average out the numbers over the total simulations

2) The graph being drawn is a cummulative line. This implies, however, that the line can never go above the total number from which it is being drawn. Concretely, out of 30 agents, if the graph shows the number of agents self-adapting, it can never go above 30 in any round. The best that can happen, is that we hit 30 pretty quickly and then stay steady.

3) However, since we're summing up and averaging over 10 simulations, depending on how the algorithm played out, the number in any round becomes independent of the number from the previous round. That is, if the average number of successful agents in round 1 is 15, the number of successful agents in round 2 could be more than 15!

4) When you draw a cummulative line with data like that, the total number of agents goes above 30, which is clearly wrong!!

5) An option is to not draw a cummulative line. This would then show the number of agents that self-adapt in each round. This would solve the above problem, but takes away completely from the time element!

Hmmm...