On Mar 28, 2008, at 9:25 PM, Nikos D. wrote:

> Hi there all, i've just submitted this proposal for this year GSoC and
> although i know that I should have posted here BEFORE submitting it
> and not afterwards i would really appreciate some feedback.

As a person who served as a mentor for the last two years all I can  
say is that I wish most of the proposals I saw were half this good.  ;)

It's clear you've put in a lot of thought about your project and you  
have a solid plan for making it happen.  The mentors that review this  
will see that and I believe it will reflect very well on you.

Good luck with the project!

> As I noticed proposals can be edited after the submission so I could  
> refine some things.

Please understand this is not a complaint, but as I was reading  
through the proposal, I found myself wondering about using constraint  
processing in addition to genetic algorithms.  I'm just mentioning  
that here so you can factor it into your thinking.  I'm not saying you  
should toss your genetic algorithm idea, but it might be a bonus if  
the system you develop could easily have the planned Charlie-based  
integration swapped out for a Gecode/R backend (assuming someone was  
willing to write it, of course):

http://gecoder.rubyforge.org/

Disclaimer:  I mentored the Gecode/R project last year and thus am  
obviously biased in this matter.

Anyway, this is just an idea I wanted to share.

> More importantly i would really like to know how this
> project sounds in general and if you think that i could benefit the
> ruby community.

The project is pretty specialized, so it may not touch those of us in  
the community not working directly in that area.  However, I feel that  
expanding Ruby into new frontiers like this definitely benefits us all.

James Edward Gray II