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Week 1

Meet with Professor Moses on the 1st of June, it was my first day. She explained the

project to me, gave me papers the written on the project which i read throughout the first and second day.

She demonstrated an earlier version of the AFS to me. Later on during the week i met

with the rest of the team and Kenneth, the guy who wrote the present AFS am

working with, explained the code to me and showed me how to run it.

Started running the AFS and writing the AFSA to analyze the data from the AFS.

The biggest challenge i faced when i began writing the AFSA,

was figuring out how to convert the AFS data from string to integer.

Completed the first version of the AFSA, it wasn’t easy writing a standard deviation

function, it drove me a bit insane. I wrote the AFSA using C++ and i wrote the first version

in the client file, breaking every rule of OOP (Object Oriented Programming).

But i wrote it this way to get an idea of how the AFSA would work.

Professor Moses looked through my first set of results and noticed some discrepancies

with the Red experimental seeds; the results did not reflect their field observations.

While trying to figure out what was wrong, we realized i had used the wrong Genetic

Algorithm (G.A) parameters to run the AFS. I made the necessary corrections and was able

to re-run most of the simulations before the end of the week.

Finished redoing the simulations with the correct G.A parameters. Started writing the second

version of the AFSA this week and also working on automating the AFS.

With Kenneth's help, i was able to automate the AFS and it can now run as many times as we want it to run.

I have also completed the second version of the AFSA, all thats left is documentation on how the AFSA works

Automating the AFS was quiet a pain for the most part of the week but after our conference call with Prof Moses,

Kenneth and i double teamed on it and got it working in 3 hours,AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I ran the AFS 50 times this week for each species, quiet a lot work, organizing the data generated

into files the AFSA could read from was time consuming, was thinking if it would be possible to write

a program that can do that? Once am done organizing, i will run the AFS another 50 times only this time,

the seeds will be placed in a specific place for each run.

Finished analyzing AFS runs from last week, worked on writing a program that can organize the results

from an automated run into seperate files. No success yet.

This week Professor Moses wanted me to use the distance parameters for Maricopa for Desetorum and Rugous,

varying the seed distribution for one set of runs and holding it constant for another set of runs.

I also started work on my final report this weekend

Finished analyzing the AFS runs i started last week for Desertorum and Rugosus, i went a step further by using

MatLab to plot the bar graph for the Mean and Standard Deviation of the Recruitment ratios for each species.

The resulting graphs gave me a clear cut idea of what the ants were doing as opposed to reading through tabulated

data and it is also easier on the eyes.