London Clojurians welcome Jen Smith and Tom Hall

This event requires registration at Skills Matter (http://skillsmatter.com/event-details/home/london-clojurians-welcome-jen-smith-and-tom-hall)

Join the London Clojurians at Skills Matter as we welcome Jen Smith and Tom Hall. This week we look forward to talks on Biologically Inspired Computing as well as Regexes Through The Looking Glass.

Jen Smith: Through The Looking Glass
As part of the Lisp In Summer Projects project, Jen has been working on janus-generators https://github.com/jennifersmith/janus-generators - a library that will eventually generate data conforming to various text based formats: regex/json/xml/edn etc.

A good summer project should basically be about deviations, yak-shaving and general stopping to smell the roses. So Jen has found her self wading knee deep into the world of logic programming to start running regexes backwards. That is, take a regex and find all the strings that conform to that regex.

In this talk she explains how she attempted to write a simplistic regex parser using instaparse https://github.com/Engelberg/instaparse and finite domain logic.

Tom Hall: Biologically Inspired Computing
Tom will be talking about a recent experiment evolving (in peoples browsers) cellular automata to perform computations, he will touch on trying to make Clojurescript fast, why you might want to use Wisp, genetic algorithms, genetic programming (and why Lisps are good for it) and introduce Enlil, his Lisp In Summer Project project that has Lisp programs as the organisms in an Artificial Life simulation.