My findings today

So. I generated this graph: http://aml.cs.byu.edu/~davidw/over_v_real_num_servers.pdf

The graph shows that for all of the algorithms that I tried, they all performed similarly. In fact, there's really no incentive to use one algorithm over another.

I'm at the stage of my research where I'd like to fix that.

I tried an idea that Kevin and I had of one stage of the algorithm that finds the correct number of solutions and another stage of the algorithm that spreads out the solution. I carried out a similar GA after finding the first preliminary solution whose purpose it was to spread out the solution. The second GA takes the solutions that the first GA found, and just tries to spread out the items in the bins. I changed the fitness of bins so that instead of preferring one really full bin and one not-so-full bin, it prefers two bins which are both semi-full.

My findings were interesting. I was getting a bit discouraged at first because the second stage was not improving solutions. However, I increased the problem set size, and vwala, the second stage saw improvement. For large problems, it gains more out of the optimization of the second step. This means that the conversation that Kevin and I were having about the problem being too simple to optimize holds rather true. Now, I just need to find some way to show this on real VMs. :)