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Running MCC Experiments

The driver project for MCC experiments is titled "MCC_Executor". This is the executable contained within the "MCC Binaries.zip" file. For a description of each execution parameter, refer to MCC Parameters. To run MCC experiments, invoke MCC_Executor.exe in the following manner:

MCC_Executor.exe maze_navigation \
ExperimentSource=file \
NumRuns=1 \
StartFromRun=1 \
GenerateAgentPopulation=true \
SeedAgentPopulationDirectory=/home/user/seed_genomes/agents/ \
ExperimentConfigDirectory=/home/user/mcc_configs/ \
OutputFileDirectory=/home/user/mcc_output/ \
SeedMazeFile=/home/user/seed_genomes/mazes/GeneratedMaze_100_Genomes_10_Height_10_Width_8_Walls.xml \
ExperimentNames="MCC Control, MCC Speciation" \
IsDistributedExecution=false

MCC Parameters

The below table enumerates all MCC experiment parameters and their function/purpose.

Parameter	Description
ExperimentSource	Source for the experiment configuration (file by default, but can also configure from RDBMS).
NumRuns	Number of runs of MCC to execute.
StartFromRun	Run number at which to begin execution. This is useful when running multiple runs of the same MCC experiment in parallel.
GenerateAgentPopulation	True/False - controls whether to generate maze population or read from seed maze genome file. Currently, reading agents from a seed file for MCC experiments is not supported; however, it would be a trivial addition.
SeedAgentPopulationDirectory	Directory containing seed agent genomes. This must be specified if GeneratePopulation is set to 'false'.
ExperimentConfigDirectory	Directory containing experiment configuration files (these are the XML files under /MCC_Executor/MazeNavigation/ExperimentConfigurations). This must be specified if ExperimentSource is set to "file" (default).
OutputFileDirectory	The directory in which to persist experiment CSV output files containing experiment results.
SeedMazeFile	The file containing seed maze genomes. Mazes are not generated by default, so this must be specified.
ExperimentNames	Comma-delimited list of experiments to execute (or just single experiment). The experiment name must match the name of the experiment configuration file.
IsDistributedExecution	This should almost always be set to false. It enables behavior very specific to the HPC environment in which the initial MCC experiments were executed (such as additional logic for interfacing with Sun Grid Engine, interfacing with external processes for moving data off the cluster, etc.) and is likely of little use in any other environment.