Dealing with complicated figures

Every now and then you will stumble on a figure that is quite challenging to draw, even for Geo-AID. In these cases, it's worth knowing a few tricks to guide Geo-AID through them.

When Geo-AID generates a figure, it does so with a certain amount of workers, over multiple cycles, until a certain condition (currently: average quality delta over the last x cycles goes below a certain value) is met. That's a lot of different generation parameters and all of them are modifiable.

  1. Worker count (-c option, 512 by default)

By modifying this parameter, you change how many different versions of a generation cycle are created. The higher the value, the more likely Geo-AID is to find the right spot for every point. It will, however, take more time and it might make certain flaws of Geo-AID's generation more visible.

  1. Generation break average delta treshold (-d option, 0.0001 by default)

Lowering this makes Geo-AID go on with generation for a little longer, essentially postponing the moment it decides it won't really get much better.

  1. Count of last records used in calculating the average delta (-m option, 128 by default)

Increasing this makes Geo-AID take more of the last cycles into consideration when deciding whether to stop.

  1. Maximum adjustment per generation cycle (-a option, 0.5 by default)

This modifies how much can a single point/scalar be changed when adjusting for another cycle. Keep in mind that this is only a base for calculations. In reality, the amount of adjustment allowed depends on the given point's quality and is different between different workers to allow both big and small changes in the same generation cycle.

Usually, the most visible effect comes from increasing the worker count. There is also a way to modify Geo-AID's behavior outside of its parameters. You can do so by modifying the point_bounds flag. Enabling them adds rules for points to be contained within (0,0) -> (1,1) range. This will heavily afftect the generation process and severely increase the time it will tak to complete. The result might not be the desired one, so don't expect too much.

Ultimately the best way of increasing odds for Geo-AID is to write the script as best as you can, relying strongly on defining points with expressions. The golden rule is: the less rules, the better.