Octopus

Octopus was originally made for Multi-Objective Evolutionary Optimization. It allows the search for many goals at once, producing a range of optimized trade-off solutions between the extremes of each goal. It is used and works similar to David Rutten's Galapagos, but introduces the Pareto-Principle for Multiple Goals.

• Based on SPEA-2 and HypE algorithm from ETH Zurich
  https://sop.tik.ee.ethz.ch/pisa/
  Also based on David Rutten's Galapagos User Interface. Christoph Zimmel added the custom user interface and the hypervolume approximation.
  • search for single goal + diversity of solutions
  • search for best trade offs between 2 to any number of goals
  • improve solutions by similarity-goals
  • choose preferred solutions during a search
  • change objectives during a search
  • solutions' 3d model in objective space for visual feedback
  • recorded history
  • save all search data within the Grasshopper document
  • save a solution as a Grasshopper State
  • export to text or text files

Octopus now also includes

• Evolutionary Breeding of Artificial Neural Networks with extended Basis Functions, based on CPPN-HyperNEAT
  http://sebastianrisi.com/
  https://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/hyperNEATpage/
   
• Interactive Evolution - Selector Component
  When running a genetic evolutionary optimization, human decisions can be added as a decision-maker.
   
• Simple Supervised Learning with Backpropagation and Artificial Neural Networks
  https://www.heatonresearch.com/encog/
  To make a component map N numeric inputs to M numeric outputs, based on examples it was shown before.
   
• Supervised Learning with a Support Vector Machine (SVM)
  To make a component map N numeric inputs to 1 numeric output, based on examples it was shown before.
   
• Octopus Explicit Components
  To build a genetic algorithm from its basic functions; allowing many different flavors of the way things are handled in the optimization.

Octopus is part of a range of tools developed at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and Bollinger+Grohmann Engineers.