Now that I’ve finished my teaching qualification (the York Learning and Teaching award) I’ve had some time to get back into research. I’ve been updating various bits of software that I haven’t used much over the last month or so, one of which was to update PyPy to version 2.5 from 2.3, skipping a version in the process. I expected that I may get a few speed bonuses but there wouldn’t be a significant improvement from 2.
I encountered an odd bug recently in my GP code. Large amounts of memory were being used, and was increasing substantially at each generation. I realised the problem was most likely in how the tree was traversed to obtain an output for each input data pattern. This was currently done with an iterative approach (which with post-order traversal is not fun!), as I’d assumed that recursive methods would use more memory.