[mlpack] A Friendly Hello + Contribution Idea

[Patrick Cando]

Hey Ryan,

Don't worry about the response, appreciate you're busy. Hope you've been
keeping well.

Definitely the latter; I think I just wanted to know if a particular topic
was "taken" already; so I'm not doubling up on someone else's efforts. I
won't hold you to weekly morning coffee sessions, promise.

I agree on the simulations; I'll definitely be working on something like
that; but yes, I'll be working independently.

If you and Marcus are happy with me poking around, I'll go ahead and start
getting my hands dirty.

Hopefully catch you all tomorrow.

Cheers,
Patrick




On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 4:04 PM Ryan Curtin <ryan at ratml.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 25, 2019 at 11:00:31AM +0000, Patrick Cando wrote:
> > Hi Ryan,
> >
> > Cheers for coming back to me!
> >
> > I agree on the GSoC; given my own deadline constraint, I probably won't
> be
> > able to work on anything on the list.
> >
> > Given that the NEAT project is proving to be quite popular, I could
> perhaps
> > implement Novelty Search (which I believe is not part of GSoC - I also
> > don't recall any emails coming in about this thus far) and add that to
> the
> > library? It combines well with my area of interest and supervisor
> > expertise. Once we get going, there's a lot we can do in that area adding
> > HyperNEAT, Differential Evolution etc. In fact, I was looking to perhaps
> do
> > a standalone implementation of Novelty Search, just to work on
> implementing
> > an algorithm; but it would be brilliant to add that to something already
> > active, as opposed to it being isolated project on Github.
> >
> > Otherwise, I'm open to other areas that you think could be useful /
> > interesting for the library.
>
> Hey Patrick,
>
> Sorry for the slightly slow response.  I don't know much about Novelty
> Search, but I do think perhaps it would be nice to include in ensmallen.
> Basically the keys there are just that we get the API right, but we
> already have a pretty established API for unconstrained
> non-differentiable functions ("arbitrary functions").  Perhaps Novelty
> Search fits there?  If so, or if we want it to be able to be
> constrained, we may need to rethink the constrained optimization API a
> little bit.  Possibly Marcus may have more comments, but definitely this
> would be nice to include.
>
> For merging it in, basically we just need (a) a good implementation
> that's hopefully as flexible as a user might want and matches the
> current API (or whatever we choose for the API); (b) good documentation
> (but that's pretty easy if we follow the existing recipes for ensmallen
> documentation); (c) good tests.  And that's about it, although it would
> be nice to run some simulations and see how novelty search compares to
> other algorithms for the same type of problem.
>
> Just to be clear, is your intention that we help do some in-detail
> mentoring for you during the summer?  Or moreso that you work on the
> code, open a PR, we give it a review, and everything is good to go?
> Personally I don't know that I have the time to take on a full mentor
> position for this project but I can make time for PR reviews, etc.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Ryan
>
> --
> Ryan Curtin    | "Hey, tell me the truth... are we still in the
> ryan at ratml.org | game?" - The Chinese Waiter
>
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