January 2005 - Haskell

CFP: ProMAS@ AAMAS 2005
by Prof. Dr. Juergen Dix 26 Jan '05

26 Jan '05

*********Sorry for multiple postings*********** Call for Papers ================= Third international Workshop on Programming Multi-Agent Systems (ProMAS'05) <http://www.cs.uu.nl/ProMAS/> ProMAS'05 is a satellite workshop at AAMAS 2005 Utrecht University, The Netherlands <http://www.aamas2005.nl/> Even though the contributions of the multi-agent systems (MAS) community can make a significant impact in the development of open distributed systems, the techniques resulting from such contributions will only be widely adopted when suitable programming languages and tools are available. Furthermore, such languages and tools must incorporate those techniques in a principled but practical way, so as to support the ever more complex task of professional programmers, in particular when the systems have to operate in dynamic environments. The ProMAS workshop series aims to address the practical programming issues related to developing and deploying multi-agent systems. In particular, ProMAS aims to address how multi-agent systems designs or specifications can be effectively implemented. In its two previous editions, ProMAS constituted an invaluable occasion bringing together leading researchers from both academia and industry to discuss issues on the design of programming languages and tools for multi-agent systems. In particular, the workshop promotes the discussion and exchange of ideas concerning the techniques, concepts, requirements, and principles that are important for multi-agent programming technology. We encourage the submission of proposals for programming languages and tools that provide specific programming constructs to facilitate the implementation of the essential concepts used in multi-agent system analysis and specifications (e.g., mental attitudes, distribution, and social interaction). We also welcome submissions describing significant multi-agent applications, as well as agent programming tools that allow the integration of agents with legacy systems. Further, we are particularly interested in approaches or applications that show clearly the added-value of multi-agent programming, and explain why and how this technology should be adopted by designers and programmers both in academia and industry. Specific topics for this workshop include, but are not limited to: - Programming Languages for multi-agent systems - Extensions of traditional languages for multi-agent programming - Theoretical and practical aspects of multi-agent programming - Computational complexity of MAS - Semantics for multi-agent programming languages - High-level executable multi-agent specification languages - Algorithms, techniques, or protocols for multi-agent issues (e.g., coordination, cooperation, negotiation) - Agent communication issues in multi-agent programming - Implementation of social and organisational aspects of MAS - Formal methods for specification and verification of MAS - Verification tools for implementations of MAS - Agent development tools and platforms - Generic tools and infrastructures for multi-agent programming - Interoperability and standards for MAS - Programming mobile agents - Safety and security for mobile MAS deployment - Fault tolerance and load balancing for mobile MAS - Application areas for multi-agent programming languages - Applications using legacy systems - Programming MAS for Grid-based applications - Programming MAS for the Semantic Web - Deployed (industrial-strength) MAS - Benchmarks and testbeds for comparing MAS languages and tools Important Dates: ---------------- Paper submission deadline: 14th of March, 2005 Notifications of acceptance/rejection: 18th of April, 2005 Camera-ready copies due: 15th of May, 2005 Workshop Date: 25th or 26th of July, 2005 (TBA) Submission Details: ------------------- Authors should submit their paper by attaching it to an email to Jürgen Dix (dix(a)tu-clausthal.de) The email should also contain paper title, author name(s), affiliation(s), contact information of the main author, and a few keywords describing the topic (eg. from the list above). Papers should be formatted using Springer LNCS style (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html) and have a maximum of 15 pages. Accepted papers will be published as a technical report and distributed among participants during the workshop. As it was the case for ProMAS'03 and ProMas'04, we are planning to publish extended versions of the accepted papers as a volume of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series by Springer-Verlag. Programme Committee: -------------------- - Chris van Aart (Acklin, The Netherlands) - Jean-Pierre Briot (University of Paris 6, France) - Monique Calisti (Whitestein Technologies, Switzerland) - Keith Clark (Imperial College, United Kingdom) - Yves Demazeau (Institut IMAG - Grenoble, France) - Frank Dignum (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) - Michael Fisher (University of Liverpool, United Kingdom) - Vladimir Gorodetsky (Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia) - Jomi Hübner (Universidade Regional de Blumenau, Brasil) - Toru Ishida (Kyoto University, Japan) - David Kinny (CTO, Agentis Software, USA) - João Leite (University Nova de Lisboa, Portugal) - Jiming Liu (Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong) - John-Jules Meyer (Utrecht University, Netherlands) - Jörg Müller (Clausthal University of Technology, Germany) - Oliver Obst (Koblenz-Landau University, Germany) - Gregory O'Hare (University College Dublin, Ireland) - Andrea Omicini (University of Bologna, Italy) - Julian Padget (University of Bath, United Kingdom) - Agostino Poggi (Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy) - Chris Reed (Calico Jack Ltd., United Kingdom) - Ichiro Satoh (National Institute of Informatics, Kyoto, Japan) - Onn Shehory (IBM Haifa Research Labs, Haifa University, Israel) - Kostas Stathis (Università di Pisa, Italy) - Milind Tambe (University of Southern California, USA) - Leendert van der Torre (CWI, Netherlands) - Paolo Torroni (University of Bologna, Italy) - Gerhard Weiss (Technische Universität München, Germany) - Michael Winikoff (RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia) - Cees Witteveen (Delft University, Netherlands) Organising Committee: --------------------- Rafael H. Bordini (University of Durham, U.K.) http://www.dur.ac.uk/r.bordini Mehdi Dastani (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) http://www.cs.uu.nl/~mehdi Jürgen Dix (Clausthal University of Technology, Germany) http://cig.in.tu-clausthal.de/ Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni (University of Paris VI, France) http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~elfallah/

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WRS'05 - Last Call for Papers (deadline January 31)
by Salvador Lucas 26 Jan '05

26 Jan '05

********************************************************************** 5th Int'l Workshop on Reduction Strategies in Rewriting and Programming WRS'05 Nara, Japan, April 22nd, 2005 Last Call For Submissions ********************************************************************** Reduction strategies in rewriting and programming have attracted an increasing attention within the last years. New types of reduction strategies have been invented and investigated, and new results on rewriting / computation under particular strategies have been obtained. Research in this field ranges from primarily theoretical questions about reduction strategies to very practical application and implementation issues. The need for a deeper understanding of reduction strategies in rewriting and programming, both in theory and practice, is obvious, since they bridge the gap between unrestricted general rewriting (computation) and (more deterministic) rewriting with particular strategies (programming). Moreover, reduction strategies provide a natural way to go from operational principles (e.g., graph and term rewriting, narrowing, lambda-calculus) and semantics (e.g., normalization, computation of values, infinitary normalization, head-normalization) to implementations of programming languages. Therefore any progress in this area is likely to be of interest not only to the rewriting community, but also to neighbouring fields like functional programming, functional-logic programming, and termination proofs of algorithms. The workshop wants to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of new ideas and results, recent developments, new research directions, as well as of surveys on existing knowledge in this area. Furthermore we aim at fostering interaction and exchange between researchers and students actively working on such topics. Information on the previous, and forthcoming, WRS editions is available from the WRS permanent homepage. TOPICS Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to: * theoretical foundations for the definition and semantic description of reduction strategies * strategies in different frameworks (term rewriting, graph rewriting, infinitary rewriting, lambda calculi, higher order rewriting and explicit substitutions, conditional rewriting, rewriting with built-ins, narrowing, constraint solving, etc.) and their application in (equational, functional, functional-logic) programming (languages) * properties of reduction strategies / computations under strategies (e.g., completeness, computability, decidability, complexity, optimality, (hyper-)normalization, cofinality, fairness, perpetuality, context-freeness, neededness, laziness, eagerness, strictness) * interrelations, combinations and applications of reduction under different strategies (e.g., equivalence conditions for fundamental properties like termination and confluence, applications in modularity analysis, connections between strategies of different frameworks, etc.) * program analysis and other semantics-based optimization techniques dealing with reduction strategies * rewrite systems / tools / implementations with flexible / programmable strategies as essential concept / ingredient * specification of reduction strategies in (real) languages * data structures and implementation techniques for reduction strategies SUBMISSIONS We solicit papers on all aspects of reduction strategies in rewriting and programming. Submissions should describe unpublished work, except for survey papers which are explicitly welcome, too. Submissions should not exceed 10 pages (however, survey papers may be longer). Please, send a message containing the title, authors, and abstract of your submission before January 21, 2005 to the PC co-chairs at wrs05(a)pps.jussieu.fr The full version of your submission should be sent in postscript or PDF format before January 31, 2005. Submissions should include the title, authors' names, affiliations, addresses, and e-mail. Selection of papers by the PC will be based on originality, significance, and correctness. Final versions will be due by March 18, 2005. PUBLICATION Accepted papers will be included in the preliminary workshop proceedings that will be available at the workshop. Selected papers will be published in the Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS) series of Elsevier. IMPORTANT DATES January 31, 2005 Deadline for electronic submission of papers February 25, 2005 Notification of acceptance of papers March 18, 2005 Deadline for final versions of accepted papers April 22, 2005 Workshop INVITED SPEAKERS * Kokichi Futatsugi (JAIST, Japan) * Hongwei Xi (Boston University, USA) PROGRAM COMMITTEE * Sergio Antoy (Portland) * Eduardo Bonelli (Stevens) * Roberto Di Cosmo (Paris VII, Co-Chair) * Bernhard Gramlich (Wien) * Stefano Guerrini (Roma) * Salvador Lucas (Valencia) * Aart Middeldorp (Innsbruck) * Yoshihito Toyama (Tohoku, Co-Chair) PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS Roberto Di Cosmo Laboratoire PPS - Universite Paris 7, France Email: roberto(a)dicosmo.org Yoshihito Toyama Tohoku University, Japan Email: toyama(a)nue.riec.tohoku.ac.jp FURTHER INFORMATION * Call for papers in Text, PostScript and PDF format * WRS permanent website: http://www.dsic.upv.es/~wrs * WRS 2005 e-mail address: wrs05(a)pps.jussieu.fr * RDP 2005 website: http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/rdp05/

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xemacs & haskell major mode
by Surendra Singhi 25 Jan '05

25 Jan '05

Is there any ilisp or slime like package for haskell, which integrates haskell with xemacs or emacs and provides a kind of integrated development environment? I am using Hugs 98. Thanks, -- Surendra Singhi www.public.asu.edu/~sksinghi/

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ICEIS'2005-International Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing Deadline extended
by KOUADRI MOSTEFAOUI Soraya 25 Jan '05

25 Jan '05

International Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing (IWUC'2005) Deadline extended. <http://www.iceis.org/workshops/iwuc/iwuc2005-cfp.html> http://www.iceis.org/workshops/iwuc/iwuc2005-cfp.html New deadline: paper submission : 15 February 2005 Regards Soraya.Kouadri.M -- Kind regards | Maa salama | Meilleures salutations Soraya Kouadri Mostéfaoui Tel: +41 26 300 84 74 PhD Student Fax: +41 26 300 97 31 Computer Science Departement Office 2.61 Pérolles University of Fribourg Chemin Du Musée 03 Switzerland CH-1700 Soraya.kouadrimostefaoui(a)unifr.ch <http://diuf.unifr.ch/people/kouadris/ <http://diuf.unifr.ch/people/~kouadris/> >

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Semantics of Haskell
by Till Mossakowski 25 Jan '05

25 Jan '05

When I looked through several papers about Haskell semantics, I found that recursive datatypes have been omitted. Is there a denotational semantics of Haskell including recursive datatypes? (or better some translation into a meta-language that has a denotational semantics) More precisely, (1) is there a translation of Haskell without polymorphism into FPC? It should be rather straightforward, but is it written down somewhere? (2) a translation of Haskell with polymorphism, polymorphic recursion, higher-rank polymorphism, into (some extension of) system F? Till Mossakowski -- Till Mossakowski Phone +49-421-218-4683 Dept. of Computer Science Fax +49-421-218-3054 University of Bremen till(a)tzi.de P.O.Box 330440, D-28334 Bremen http://www.tzi.de/~till

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IEEE/WIC/ACM Intelligent Agent Technology - IAT 2005
by WI-IAT 2005 21 Jan '05

21 Jan '05

[Apologies if you receive this more than once] ##################################################################### IEEE/WIC/ACM Intelligent Agent Technology 2005 CALL FOR PAPERS ##################################################################### 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT'05) September 19-22, 2005 Compiegne University of Technology, France http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/IAT05/ http://www.hds.utc.fr/IAT05/ Sponsored By IEEE Computer Society Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC) Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ********************************************************************** - Paper submission due: April 3, 2005 - Submission websites: http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/IAT05/ http://www.hds.utc.fr/IAT05/ - Electronic submissions are required in the form of PDF or PS files ********************************************************************** The 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT'05) will be jointly held with the 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI'05 http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/WI05/, http://www.hds.utc.fr/WI05/) The IEEE/WIC/ACM 2005 joint conferences are sponsored and organized by IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computational Intelligence (TCCI) (http://www.cs.uvm.edu/~xwu/tcci/index.shtml) Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC) (http://wi-consortium.org) and ACM-SIGART (http://www.acm.org/sigart/) The upcoming meeting in this conference series follows the great success of IAT-99 held in Hong Kong, IAT-01 held in Maebashi City, Japan, IAT-03 held in Halifax, Canada, and IAT-04 in Beijing, China. +++++++ Topics +++++++ The topics and areas include, but not limited to: * Autonomy-Oriented Computing (AOC) Agent-Based Complex Systems Modeling and Development Agent-Based Simulation Autonomy-Oriented Modeling and Computation Methods Behavioral Self-Organization Complex Behavior Characterization and Engineering Emergent Behavior Hard Computational Problem Solving Self-Organized Criticality Self-Organized Intelligence Swarm Intelligence Nature-Inspired Paradigms * Autonomous Knowledge and Information Agents Agent-Based Distributed Data Mining Agent-Based Knowledge Discovery And Sharing Autonomous Information Services Distributed Knowledge Systems Emergent Natural Law Discovery in Multi-Agent Systems Evolution of Knowledge Networks Human-Agent Interaction Information Filtering Agents Knowledge Aggregation Knowledge Discovery Ontology-Based Information Services * Agent Systems Modeling and Methodology Agent Interaction Protocols Cognitive Architectures Cognitive Modeling of Agents Emotional Modeling Fault-Tolerance in Multi-Agent Systems Formal Framework for Multi-Agent Systems Information Exchanges in Multi-Agent Systems Learning and Self-Adaptation in Multi-Agent Systems Mobile Agent Languages and Protocols Multi-Agent Autonomic Architectures Multi-Agent Coordination Techniques Multi-Agent Planning and Re-Planning Peer-to-Peer Models for Multi-Agent Systems Reinforcement Learning Social Interactions in Multi-Agent Systems Task-Based Agent Context Task-Oriented Agents * Distributed Problem Solving Agent-Based Grid Computing Agent Networks in Distributed Problem Solving Collective Group Behavior Coordination and Cooperation Distributed Intelligence Dynamics of Agent Groups and Populations Efficiency and Complexity Issues Market-Based Computing Problem-Solving in Dynamic Environments Distributed Search * Autonomous Auctions and Negotiation Agent-Based Marketplaces Auction Markets Combinatorial Auctions Hybrid Negotiation Integrative Negotiation Mediating Agents Pricing Agents Thin Double Auctions * Applications Agent-Based Assistants Agent-Based Virtual Enterprise Embodied Agents and Agent-Based Systems Applications Interface Agents Knowledge and Data Intensive Systems Perceptive Animated Interfaces Scalability Social Simulation Socially Situated Planning Software and Pervasive Agents Tools and Standards Ubiquitous Systems and E-Technology Agents Ubiquitous Software Services Virtual Humans XML-Based Agent Systems +++++++++++++++++ Important Dates +++++++++++++++++ Electronic submission of full papers: ** April 3, 2005 ** Notification of paper acceptance: June 9, 2005 Workshop and tutorial proposals: June 9, 2005 Camera-ready of accepted papers: July 4, 2005 Workshops/Tutorials: September 19, 2005 Conference: September 20-22, 2005 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ On-Line Submissions and Publication ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ High-quality papers in all IAT related areas are solicited. Papers exploring new directions or areas will receive a careful and supportive review. All submitted papers will be reviewed on the basis of technical quality, relevance, significance, and clarity. Note that IAT'05 will accept ONLY on-line submissions, containing PDF (PostScript or MS-Word) versions. The conference proceedings will be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press. IAT'05 also welcomes Industry Track and Demo submissions, Workshop and Tutorial proposals. More detailed instructions and the On-Line Submission Form can be found from the IAT'05 homepages: http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/IAT05/ or http://www.hds.utc.fr/IAT05. A selected number of IAT'05 accepted papers will be expanded and revised for inclusion in Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal (http://wi-consortium.org/journal.html) and in Annual Review of Intelligent Informatics (http://www.wi-consortium.org/annual.html) The best paper awards will be conferred on the authors of the best papers at the conference. ++++++++++++++++++++++++ Conference Organization ++++++++++++++++++++++++ Conference Chairs: Pierre Morizet, University of Technology of Compiegne, France Jiming Liu, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong Program Chair: Andrzej Skowron, Warsaw University, Poland Steering Committee Chair: Ning Zhong, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan IAT-Track Program Co-chairs: Jean-Paul Barthes, University of Technology of Compiegne, France Lakhmi Jain, University of South Australia, Australia Ron Sun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA WI-Track Program Co-chairs: Rakesh Agrawal, IBM Almaden Research Center, USA Mike Luck, University of Southampton, UK Takahira Yamaguchi, Shizuoka University, Japan IAT-Track Program Vice Chairs: Barbara Dunin-Keplicz, Warsaw University, Poland Amal El Fallah-Segrougchni, University of Paris 6, France Eugenio Oliveira, University of Porto, Portugl Marek Sergot, Imperial College, UK Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, UWF/Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, USA Katia Sycara, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Maria Gini, University of Minnesota, USA Churn-Jung Liau, Academia Sinica, Taiwan Zhongzhi Shi, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Liz Sonenberg, The University of Melbourne, Australia WI-Track Program Vice Chairs: Matthias Klusch, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Germany Joost Kok, Leiden University, The Netherlands Steve Willmott, Universitat Politccnica de Catalunya, Spain Ubbo Visser, Universitat Bremen, Germany Mario Cannataro, University "Magna Grecia" of Catanzaro, Italy Nick Cercone, Dalhousie University, Canada W. Lewis Johnson, University of Southern California, USA Lina Zhou, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA Massimo Marchiori, MIT Lab for Computer Science, USA Sankar K. Pal, Indian Statistical Institute, India Toyoaki Nishida, Kyoto University, Japan Einoshin Suzuki, Yokohama National University, Japan Chengqi Zhang, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Industry/Demo-Track Chairs: Jianchang Mao, Yahoo! Inc., USA Toshiharu Sugawara, NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan Workshop Chair: Pawan Lingras, Saint Mary's University, Canada Tutorial Chair: Rineke Verbrugge, University of Groningen, NL Publicity Chairs: Jim Peters, University of Manitoba, Canada James Wang, Clemson University, USA Organizing Chair: Francois Peccoud, University of Technology of Compiegne, France Local Arrangement Chairs: Marie-Helene Abel, University of Technology of Compiegne, France Claude Moulin, University of Technology of Compiegne, France *** Contact Information *** wi-iat05(a)maebashi-it.org

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Trie vs FiniteMap
by Krasimir Angelov 21 Jan '05

21 Jan '05

Hello, Guys I am playing with the attached implementation of Trie. My first test I compared (Trie Char Int) with (FiniteMap String Int). The test is shows that the trie is much faster in lookup but the insertion is slower for large data sets. The lookup in Trie is about 65% faster and this doesn't depend from the size of the trie. When the trie has up to 5000 keys then the insertion is about 30% faster than in FiniteMap. When the number of keys is about 10000 then the Trie and the FiniteMap have comparative performance, but when there are about 100000 keys then the Trie is about 20-30% slower. I am interested whether there is a better implementation of Trie. Does anyone have an another implementation of tries which can show better performance? Cheers, Krasimir

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RE: [Haskell] Implicit parallel functional programming
by Tim Harris 20 Jan '05

20 Jan '05

> But in the worst case its just a sequential computation, so any gain from > parallelism is still a gain... The trade-offs involved look like they'd be very complicated in practice. For instance, considering speculative execution on SMT / multi-core environments: - The mechanisms used to enable parallel evaluation may add direct costs to straight line code -- e.g. I'd hope there's no need for "real" locking in fast paths, but what's the cost in terms of interlocked instructions and memory barriers? - The execution of speculative threads on other cores may add indirect costs by causing extra cache misses in mainline threads. - Incorrectly speculated execution may still produce garbage; how much of this can we keep processor-local? Do traditional parallel GC techniques handle this well, or do we need better support for generally-thread-local heaps and something that looks more like distributed GC between them (or Ln-cache-local for some value of n)? - The sharing between cores / threads is likely to be non-trivial -- e.g. no point using two hyperthreads to execute memory-bound operations on the same core if the memory bus to that core is saturated (James Bulpin's thesis from cl.cam.ac.uk has some stats from SPEC benchmarks and discusses some of the scheduling problems). Cheers, Tim

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RE: [Haskell] Implicit parallel functional programming
by Simon Peyton-Jones 20 Jan '05

20 Jan '05

| > I thought the "lazy functional languages are great for implicit | > parallelism" thing died out some time ago - at least as far as running | > the programs on conventional hardware is concerned. Some quick thoughts. 1. Like Ben L, I don't believe in totally-automated parallelism from lazy FP. But that doesn't mean that lazy FP is bad for parallel machines. On the contrary, it is *absolutely fantastic* that a program decorated with some parallel strategies (see the paper Ben mentioned http://research.microsoft.com/%7Esimonpj/Papers/strategies.ps.gz) is guaranteed to give the same results on a multiprocessor as on a uni-processor. Adding parallel strategies can't make your program go wrong. 2. One reason that implicitly-parallel FP has never "made it" despite lots of work over the last 20 yrs (!) is that uni-processors have kept getting faster. That has already changed (http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm) We're going to see multi-processors on a chip, because Intel doesn't know what else to do with their transistors. Getting more performance is going to *require* parallelism, which is a real change; until now, parallel processors kept getting outpaced by next year's sequential ones. 3. Furthermore, if everyone has 10 processors on their desk (because you can't buy a machine with fewer -- I'm speculating a little here) then the utilisation efficiency is less important than it used to be. If you have 10 processors anyway, then a programming system that lets you use 3 with minimal effort would be splendid. Whereas up to today if someone forks out for a 10-node machine they jolly well want to use almost all of those 10. 4. Most parallel-FP implementations thus far have been on distributed memory multiprocessors, connected by LANs or some other switch fabric. In particular, each processor has had a separate heap, which entails lots of marshalling and copying of graph between one heap and another. It's incredibly hard to recover these overheads. The new multi-cores will be much more closely coupled, and can share a common heap, with rather high bandwidth between processors. In short, I think things are changing. Simon

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Announce: Adaptive Simulated Annealing interface for haskell
by John Meacham 19 Jan '05

19 Jan '05

I have made a basic binding to Lester Ingber's Adaptive Simulated Annealing code. Adaptive simulated annealing is a general purpose non-linear optimization algorithm which can (be statistically guarenteed to) find the minimum of arbitrary many-dimensional functions. I am hoping this will turn into the beginning of general very easy to use optimization libraries for haskell. The idea being general optimization is incredibly useful for things like presentation, quick-n-dirty code generators, graph drawing and a lot of other things but getting a problem into a form suitable for an optimizer is usually a lot of work. If a general always-available pretty good optimizer were available, it could drastically speed up the development of complex haskell apps. I am mainly interested in feedback on my Optimize.Parameter class, which I think may be a novel method of interfacing with an optimizer from a strongly typed language. Based on the type of the function you pass it, which can even include haskell union types such as Maybe and Either, it will transform your problem into a suitable function of many properly constrained continuous and integral variables. This function can then be passed to any off-the-shelf non-linear solver. I include a very basic interface to a C implemention of Adaptive Simulated Annealing as it tends to be a robust general purpose algorithm (and is free), however a commercial or specialized back end would work just as well. the main interface to the solver consists of the single function minimize :: Parameter z x => z -> (x -> Double) -> IO x which given a function of x -> Double, will return the x where that function takes on its globally minimal value. Parameter z x means that your parameter is of type x and it takes configuration constraints of type z an example of use is: f :: (Bool,(Double,Double)) -> Double f (tf,(x,y)) = if tf then x*x + y*y else x + x*x - log y g :: Either (Int,Int) Int -> Double g (Left (x,y)) = realToFrac $ x * y g (Right r) = pi*(realToFrac r)^2 v1 <- minimize (empty,(limit (-10) 3, limit 4 7)) f v2 <- minimize (empty,(limit (-10) 3, limit 4 7)) (negate . f) v3 <- minimize ((limit 10 100,limit 3 1000), limit 4 1000) g v4 <- minimize ((limit 10 100,limit 3 1000), limit 4 1000) (negate . g) results in: print v1 => (False,(-0.5000008601544335,6.999999999568565)) print v2 => (True,(-9.99999999999775,6.9999999999934595)) print v3 => Left (10,3) print v4 => Right 1000 (This run was specifically done with low iteration count) See the Parameter instances for details on the various constraints which can be passed to the first argument of minimize. This is a work in progress, I thought I'd get some early feedback to see if the ideas were interesting at all or if I am repeating someone elses work. I am in general a big fan of simple interfaces to complex back ends and am quite enjoying the ability of haskell types to convey all the meta-information you usually need to explicitly specify in other languages. my code: http://repetae.net/john/recent/out/HsASA.html Lester's ASA page: http://www.ingber.com/ John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈

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