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Well, we can find or create equivalences. Someone I knew did a master thesis on the male reproductive system, he told me that males have 10-15 largely independ

Well, we can find or create equivalences. Someone I knew did a master thesis on the male reproductive system, he told me that males have 10-15 largely independent biological pathways to produce sperm. From nature's perspective the point is presumably that if you can still breathe, you should be able to reproduce :) If we were to put the same level of effort into a file reading module, we would have the files replicated over 10-15 different systems with file reading code written by a dozen different people in a dozen different languages, all using different heuristics to locate a similar file (or a backup) if the original wasn't found. Add some sort of selection mechanism to pick the best result from the 10-15 return values, and you would have a very resilient file reader :) I can't imagine we will ever want to write code like that by hand - drawbacks include development cost and maintenance hassle, and the system becomes very hard to understand and debug. But it's still an interesting approach. In computer systems I suppose we could bring it about by some variant of evolutionary programming. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_programming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_programming )

jerf 16y ago
Yeah, that's pretty much how I was thinking of it. Enormous effort, even if you do get to use evolution. And consider the whole cycle of building a web page; organically retrieve a file, organically open a connection to a database (with an organic protocol, of course) to organically retrieve some organic data, organically convert it to some sort of organic representation (HTML is too rigid, we'd need some sort of probabilistic representation or something) and organically render it in a browser; the complication is simply enormous and the payoff? For enormously more computational power, you have a net decrease in the reliability of the whole process. I could see how AI could use such a thing, especially since the best intelligence we know works that way. But in general? It seems less than awesome.

jerf 16y ago

Yeah, that's pretty much how I was thinking of it. Enormous effort, even if you do get to use evolution. And consider the whole cycle of building a web page; organically retrieve a file, organically open a connection to a database (with an organic protocol, of course) to organically retrieve some organic data, organically convert it to some sort of organic representation (HTML is too rigid, we'd need some sort of probabilistic representation or something) and organically render it in a browser; the complication is simply enormous and the payoff? For enormously more computational power, you have a net decrease in the reliability of the whole process. I could see how AI could use such a thing, especially since the best intelligence we know works that way. But in general? It seems less than awesome.