Happy Ides of March! Watch your backs, and remember: the day ain’t over ’til it’s over…
I took a graduate-level computer-aided design course in college — way back when CAD/CAM/CAE was really not a consumer-grade product — and a good part of the course was about optimization. I happened to think about that the other day when I was idly browsing through various Python modules (the way one does), and I ran across a genetic algorithm package.
Genetic algorithms had their own vogue a few decades back, but that long-ago was long after I left college. Still, playing with it got me to reminiscing about the the things we did way back in school, and about the program we used and our professor (Dr Michael Pappas, who was its author), so I Googled him and the program.
Dr Pappas passed away in 2015 — I found his obituary. He was a major player in the computer-aided and biomedical engineering worlds, and was the co-inventor of the artificial knee, among other things. I knew he was a big deal back in the day, but I guess I never realized how big a deal he was. (He had a pronounced limp and a seriously deformed back/hip, so I suspect he had some skin in the artificial joint game.) He was fairly intense, and was one of those guys who always seemed on the edge of blowing his stack, though in fact he was always decent and patient with us students. That was one of my all-time favorite classes…
The optimization program itself was called CADOP5; it was written in FORTRAN and it was a bear to use. (I remember him telling us, at the start of the course, that we needed to start working now on our optimization project, because it couldn’t be finished in a day, or a week, or even two weeks… I was probably the only one in the class to get an A on the project, and I wasn’t even able to find the optimum solution — though I was able to say why.) When I searched for CADOP5, I didn’t find much except this thesis at NJIT. The program given in that paper was a refinement called CADOP8; I might have met the student working on it at some point, but he had his PhD by the time I took the course with Dr Pappas.
I really did like that class a lot, and its professor, and in fact tried to get Dr Pappas as my thesis advisor, but I got some behind-the-scenes stonewalling from one of his other students/assistants (it took naive me about a year to realize that maybe I’d been undermined), so did my thesis on linkages under Dr Sodhi, and the rest is history — or at least, water under the bridge.
Back to the Python genetic algorithm: I downloaded it and wrote a little program to test it. It was amazingly easy to use, like all things Python, but it seemed pretty slow to me. (High computation cost? Slow convergence? No idea.) There are many other optimization critters out there in the Python ecosystem, I wonder how they would stack up against that one particular genetic algorithm module, or against those ancient CADOP programs for that matter.
Anyway, something from the Wayback Machine: this and this are what I was writing fifteen years ago, maybe a month or so before I met Anne.
