Ok, so here’s what the program is going to do… On the picnicmob.org website, people answer a bunch of random questions. What we want our program to do is take a picture of a city park, a list of answers people gave on the questions, and have it figure out where people should sit in the park so that their neighbors are as similar as possible to them, based on similar answers for the questions. We’re going to do this using a standard simulated annealing algorithm. (Read this for more info… we’ll be describing the basics below, too…)
The only preparation you need to do for this tutorial is install the Glasgow Haskell Compiler– You can get the latest version from here. It’s a very well supported and very fast compiler. We’re just going to use the basic GHC libraries in this tutorial- No other installs are needed.