Berbalang is a genetic programming laboratory principally dedicated to the
exploration of "weird machines" (or "emergent execution") through evolutionary
methods. At its core is a complete reimplementation of
ROPER, a system I designed while at Dalhousie
University, in 2018, to study the evolution of return-oriented programming (ROP)
payloads on the ARM architecture. A substantially overhauled and improved version
of ROPER can be found in the berbalang::roper module.
In addition to roper, Berbalang includes a few other genetic programming testbeds
as well, including berbalang::linear_gp, a basic linear genetic programming system,
which evolves programs for a simple, register-transfer machine, and berbalang::hello_world,
a simple genetic algorithm system for evolving strings to match a given target.
We'll assume that you plan to house Berbalang into ~/src/berbalang.
First, clone the repository:
[~/src]$ git clone https://github.com/oblivia-simplex/berbalang
[~/src]$ cd berbalang
[~/src/berbalang]$ nix-shell
...
[nix-shell:~/src/berbalang]$ cargo build --release
TODO
TODO
TODO
First, set up a log directory. We'll assume that you chose ../logs for this purpose.
Then create a directory containing experiment specification files, following the example
provided in berbalang/config.toml. Let's say you're using
./experiments/foobar/ as your experiment specification directory.
Each toml file in that directory should specify the parameters for a series of trial runs.
Then, run, say, 100 trials for under each specification with
[~/src/berbalang]$ ./trials.sh ./experiments/foobar 100 ../logs
The resulting logs will be available under
../logs/berbalang/$JOB/$SELECTION_METHOD/$YEAR/$MONTH/$DAY
Python scripts and tools for analysing experiment data can be found in
berbalang/analysis.
