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It's a great response; the strange thing is that it is necessary at all. An aside: am I the only one who thinks Atwood's sandpaper analogy is a bit like Creati
by michael_dorfman 16y ago
It's a great response; the strange thing is that it is necessary at all.
An aside: am I the only one who thinks Atwood's sandpaper analogy is a bit like Creationism? "Random mutations and natural selection can only smooth out small details, they can't create a whole new species...."
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- derefr 16y agoNot to say your analogy isn't correct, but really, not much can be done with a pure mutation+selection mechanism—most really do just get stuck at local minima. This is why most "successful" organisms on Earth (depending on your definition of success) don't just use that mechanism. Rather, most biological life has discovered a secondary form of selection—evolution—which is powered by sexual recombination, where groups of large-scale, successful changes are introduced to other such groups, all simultaneously. This is what makes genetic algorithms different from generic hill-climbing algorithms (which the system of an A/B-test plus a designer simulates.) On a larger economic scale, however, all those much-decried people saying "I want to build something that is Facebook + Google News + Basecamp + a toaster" are sort of performing the sexual recombination step, if they actually manage to get it built instead of just making incessant Craigslist job postings ;)