3 ms·
Not too bad, but sort of like trying to describe an elephant as a bunch of balloons and a water hose glued onto a bail of hay on a table. I also dislike those
by api 16y ago
Not too bad, but sort of like trying to describe an elephant as a bunch of balloons and a water hose glued onto a bail of hay on a table.
I also dislike those sorts of analogies because they are loaded with aesthetic value judgements that do not apply. Programming code that looked like that would be ugly. The genetic system is beautiful and elegant.
- sliverstorm 16y ago> The genetic system is beautiful and elegant. Only because you don't have to maintain it
- api 16y agoThat's what's so beautiful and elegant about it. When "executed" it evolves, so it maintains itself.
- Retric 16y agoThe better you understand the way DNA works the less elegant it looks. It's a steaming pile of Hacks on top of Hacks and frighteningly buggy. This encodes protean X, however it only folds up correctly 15% of the time. However, Y bumps things up to 70% and Z get's you to 90%. The other 10% well that depends on the shape some of these are used by Z to do... Why do we know this? Well both Y and Z are defective 2-3 percent of the time resulting in... etc. PS: Don't get me wrong the happy path works well most of the time and when it fails early it's just a non viable embryo so no problem. However, saying it's elegant is like saying all airplanes in the sky must be easy to maintain because you never see anyone outside fixing them.
- extension 16y agoYour code would evolve and maintain itself too, if you could afford to wait millions of years and let it randomly break for a large portion of your users.
- sliverstorm 16y agoAnd by 'large portion' we are referring to 99.999999% of them