Evolutionary Informatics

Efficient Per Query Information Extraction from a Hamming Oracle [with Erratum]

Winston Ewert, George Montañez, William A. Dembski, Robert J. Marks II

Abstract

Computer search often uses an oracle to determine the value of a proposed problem solution. Information is extracted from the oracle using repeated queries. Crafting a search algorithm to most efficiently extract this information is the job of the programmer. In many instances this is done using the programmer's experience and knowledge of the problem being solved. For the Hamming oracle, we have the ability to assess the performance of various search algorithms using the currency of query count. Of the search procedures considered, blind search performs the worst. We show that evolutionary algorithms, although better than blind search, are a relatively inefficient method of information extraction. An algorithm methodically establishing and tracking the frequency of occurrence of alphabet characters performs even better. We also show that a search for the search for an optimal tree search, as suggested by our previous work, becomes computationally intensive.

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Related Resources

• Data Set Raw data files for experiments performed in paper (.zip format)