[HN Gopher] Genetically synthesized supergain broadband wire-bun...
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       Genetically synthesized supergain broadband wire-bundle antenna
        
       Author : sharpshadow
       Score  : 43 points
       Date   : 2024-07-26 05:42 UTC (5 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | drwu wrote:
       | This looks like just _a little bit_ advanced trivial
       | optimizations for reducing size of high gain antennae. Usually I
       | expect to find such articles in IEEE Transactions on Antennas and
       | Propagation.
       | 
       | What is the reason that it appears on Nature? Just because the
       | genetic methods become the hype (again)?
        
         | verdverm wrote:
         | Perhaps they are having their Eureqa moment
         | 
         | https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1165893
         | 
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureqa
        
           | baq wrote:
           | For those who're only distantly aware of the kind of problem
           | this solves (like me), the wikipedia link further elaborates:
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_regression
           | 
           | and turns out there's a Python package
           | 
           | https://github.com/MilesCranmer/PySR
           | 
           | I've needed something like this at least once (but IIRC no
           | more than twice ;) ), so I'm glad to know what to look for
           | next time, thanks for the rabbit hole!
        
             | verdverm wrote:
             | The Science paper launched my PhD topic. I asked a
             | professor what they did for research, they listed a bunch
             | of boring things... saw that and then asked "Did you see
             | that talk about evolving equations? Do you want to work on
             | that?" I was like hell yes!
             | 
             | (Hod gave a talk at our uni about all his research topics)
             | 
             | I wrote a deterministic algorithm for SymReg that
             | outperforms genetic programming.
             | 
             | https://github.com/verdverm/pypge
        
         | semi-extrinsic wrote:
         | Note that this is not in the journal _Nature_ , but the
         | considerably lower impact _Nature Communications Engineering_.
         | 
         | It's so new that it does not yet have an impact factor, but
         | Nature themselves say it's less prestigious than their second-
         | tier journal _Nature Communications_.
         | 
         | The name is also super weird, because you could well be led to
         | believe the journal is about Communications Engineering, but it
         | is actually Communications on Engineering.
        
       | Havoc wrote:
       | Disappointed that it doesn't look weird & alien :(
        
       | jonathanlydall wrote:
       | Initially I misread "supergain" as "supergrain" in the title and
       | was especially intrigued.
        
         | twic wrote:
         | This antenna has a uniquely high Q factor (quinoa).
        
       | progbits wrote:
       | See also this funky looking antenna NASA made with genetic
       | algorithm in 2006:
       | 
       | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna#/media/File%...
        
       | twic wrote:
       | Genetic optimisation seems like an odd choice here. The
       | fundamental operation of genetic optimisation is crossing over -
       | taking two solutions, and picking half the parameters from one,
       | and half from the other. This makes sense if parameters make
       | independent contributions to fitness. But the case of antenna
       | design, surely that's exactly what they don't? The position of
       | each element relative to the other elements matters enormously.
       | If you had two decent antenna designs, cut both in half, and
       | glued the halves together, i would expect that to be a crappy
       | antenna.
       | 
       | It would be interesting to see an evaluation of genetic
       | optimisation vs more conventional techniques like simplex or
       | BOBYQA, or anything else in NLopt.
        
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       (page generated 2024-07-31 23:02 UTC)