NASA + Open Source + Evolutionary Computation = JavaGenes

Hallo!!

NASA has an Open Source project: NASA Open Source Software - NOSA

NASA conducts research and development in software and software technology as an essential response to the needs of NASA missions. Under the NASA Software Release policy, NASA has several options for the release of NASA developed software technologies. These options now include Open Source software release. This option is under the NASA Open Source Agreement "NOSA".

The motivations for NASA to distribute software codes Open Source are:

to increase NASA software quality via community peer review;

to accelerate software development via community contributions;

to maximize the awareness and impact of NASA research;

to increase dissemination of NASA software in support of NASA's education mission.

What I found very interesting is the JavaGenes software system. "JavaGenes is a fairly general purpose evolutionary software system written in Java. It implements several versions of the genetic algorithm, simulated annealing, stochastic hill climbing and other search techniques. JavaGenes has been used to evolve molecules, atomic force field parameters, digital circuits, Earth Observing Satellite schedules, and antennas. The digital circuit searches didn't work very well and the code isn't here. The antenna code is not, and may never be, available for open source distribution. Compared to version 0.7.28, this version includes the molecule evolution code and a number of other improvements.

At least it is a beginning. It's normal that just some packages are available, since the most part of software from aeronautic/astronautic industry is kept in "secret", because they play an important role in international and strategic issues related to military and technology affairs.

By the way, the most important is that Evolutionary Computation is helping to solve problems in the Space Exploration field.

Até Mais!!

Marcelo