Originally posted by iamatiger
Yeah, I didn't think it would find *the* optimum, just that with a little heat (random jiggles to point velocities), and a few particles, and several runs, it probably would give a good guess. Then i could try it on 3 points upwards and see which shapes it got.
Hmm, I have tried (and so far failed) to set rules fora given set of random points which will "attract" it towards an optimum solution, so I looked at the simplex idea. However that hits the problem below:
To start off, we generate N+1 sets of points, where N is the number of points in each set. In step one we order them all by "goodness", which is here how low their largest/smallest is. So far so good.
But in step 2 we need to calculate the average, what is the average of a set of sets of points? I am stumped by this. Say I have 4 points in a line, 4 points at the corners of a square, and 4 points making an equilateral triangle with a centre points; how do I generate a new set of 4 points that is the "average" of all of those?
Can anyone help? Does anyone have any ideas? If the shapes were similar I could put them all at the same orientation and take the average of each point, but this does not work with dissimilar shapes....