Blog » Blog Archive » DarwinTunes: a social experiment. Computer program uses interactive genetic algorithm to help witn. Criminals are having a harder time hiding their faces, thanks to new software that helps witnesses recreate and recognize suspects using principles borrowed from the fields of optics and genetics. Recently, Christopher Solomon of the University of Kent in Canterbury, England presented the software, called the EFIT-V system, at the Optical Society's (OSA) Annual Meeting, Frontiers in Optics (FiO), which took place Oct. 11-15 in San Jose, Calif.
The software is being used by approximately 15 police departments in the United Kingdom and by a half dozen European countries, including France and Switzerland. In field trials conducted by the Derbyshire police force, it led to twice as many identifications of suspects as traditional methods. Law enforcement agencies around the world traditionally employ sketch artists, who piece together faces in a process similar to assembling a Mr. Potato Head toy. His software generates its own faces that progressively evolve to match the witness' memories. aM laboratory. Weasel program. Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.quote from Hamlet - the origin of the term The thought experiment was formulated by Richard Dawkins, and the first simulation written by him; various other implementations of the program have been written by others.
Overview[edit] In chapter 3 of his book The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins gave the following introduction to the program, referencing the well-known infinite monkey theorem: I don't know who it was first pointed out that, given enough time, a monkey bashing away at random on a typewriter could produce all the works of Shakespeare. The operative phrase is, of course, given enough time. Let us limit the task facing our monkey somewhat. The scenario is staged to produce a string of gibberish letters, assuming that the selection of each letter in a sequence of 28 characters will be random. Generation 02: WDLTMNLT DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO P.