factorio-optimizer

Lets do Factorio Calculator but make it optimize.

Why not use Factorio Calculator?

• Becuase factorio calculator is not general.
• The approach it uses only works when everything only has 1 recipe (you can calculate total derivatives, since the change in the number of recipe a entirely descrbes the change in the quantity of item x).
• When everything has 1 recipe there is only 1 solution iron-ore → iron-plate → iron-gear-wheel, thus when you need 3 iron-gear-wheels you can simply multiply this tree.
• With multiple recipes there are in affect an infinite number of permutations of possible combinations that produce the desired resource (you can only calculate partial derivatives since changes in recipe a only partially describes changes in the quantity of item x)

What does this do?

The same thing as factorio calculator, but in a generalized form that can be applied to any number of recipes/mods.

Why this approach?

1. We can't calculate total derivatives so that shuts off solving it, we can only optimize it.
2. Since we can calculate partial derivatives and we have a relatively high dimensionality (the number of recipes, in base game 160) gradient descent allows for more intelligent optimization than an approach like bayesian optimization.