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The shark example brings to mind Star Trek TNG, when someone would 'write' a programme by simply giving vague voice commands to the computer, and end up with ex

• tariqali34 11y ago
  This is how I would imagine the 'fierce shark' being programmed: 1) The "fierce" plugin is installed and immediately run. It is targeted on the shark sprite. 2) "Fierce" is an evolutionary algorithm. It will create several hundred generations of a shark, mutating the shark sprite in some small way. The shark's fitness is based on how 'scary' the shark is, and the 'scariness' of the shark is calculated based on a dataset compiled by children that rated how scary colored pictures were from a scale of 1 to 10. The evolutionary algorithm's goal is to maximize the fitness of the shark. 3) The final shark (with the highest fitness) is outputted to the user. It will look very similar to a normal shark, with some minor variations in color to increase the scariness of the shark. What these people are doing is not impossible. However, the potential for so-called "leaky abstractions"[0] messing up the development process is very high. Programmers will likely be necessary, if only to ensure the abstractions are functioning well enough for non-programmers to use. [0]http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...