Genetic Algorithms and Machine Learning for Programmers

How to Get a Turtle into a Paper Bag

You now have an overview of hill climbing and simulated annealing. Next, you’ll see how to hill climb or descend a few different paper bags. Be forewarned, though, your turtles will get stuck in some of these. After that, you’ll hit the setup with a hammer to simulate annealing. From there, you’ll see how to use a temperature to model the energy of your system. This means you can probabilistically move the turtle to different spots. Ready for some hill climbing?

Climb Down a Hill

Your first recipe starts the turtle on the top-left edge of the bag. You’ll move him a step, and then stop when the next step would be up:

pos = bag.left()
height = pos.y
while True:
  pos.step()
  if pos.y > height:
 break ...