So Brian’s enigmatic “howling” post was about our Redmine project tracking software being a bit broken. It’s been fixed, and in the meantime we have implemented all but three of the Push3 instructions in the Nudge interpreter.
At the same time, we’ve been working in “back burner” mode on search functionality: the genetic programming (and particle swarm and differential evolution and hillclimbing and simulated annealing) engine that will take individuals from a search over the space of Nudge programs, evaluate them according to user-defined objective functions, and intelligently select new ones that are better. That’s a big chunk of design spikes, and we’ve got a strong feeling there’s a lot of useful stuff in the design spikes that can be simplified down into a clean, elegant solution for interactive search.
So at the same time we’re polishing off the last of the Nudge Interpreter’s ability to execute Push3 programs, we’re gearing up that effort.
I’m thinking what we should do is plan our first public release of the Nudge interpreter (which will execute Nudge programs, and potentially translate to and from Push3 syntax) as a separate event from the search system. It might take a few weeks to get the implementation done on that, and while there aren’t exactly thronging masses clamoring at the gate, it would be a nice milestone.