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What do you mean? You trivially simulated the process of figuring out that an animal needs to grow a new leg/organ in response to some environmental situation o

by bitL 7y ago

What do you mean? You trivially simulated the process of figuring out that an animal needs to grow a new leg/organ in response to some environmental situation or to gain "an upper leg" against its adversaries? Are you serious?

ben_w 7y ago
Genetic algorithms are a very easy to implement form of AI. The hard part is to create a fitness function which does what you actually want — In the wild, reality and competitors are your fitness function, and none needs to be created; conversely, in a simulation the fitness function is necessarily artificial, and can be made to reach any goal you want, from “compose a song” to “write the rules for an AI for this video game so I don’t have to” to “discover a new superconductor” to “design a clock” to “learn to walk”… etc., and all of those are real examples. Separately, as an algorithm, evolution also has easily characterisable failure modes (local minima), and we do observe those failure modes in organic examples. But, to emphasise, the fact artificial evolution requires us to write our own fitness functions is merely an implementation detail; these algorithms work because evolution works. They produce novel solutions without the authors of the programs creating the solutions.
- antisemiotic 7y ago
  Humans have a history of occasionally choosing bad fitness functions that predates computers, for example look at the awful things we've done to persian cats or chihuahua dogs.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Well yes. Also, the fact that brains (not even just human ones) influence the real world’s organic evolutionary fitness functions does make it somewhat impossible to perfectly replicate in a computer. Fortunately my point has no dependency on any specific fitness function, natural or programmed — my argument has been that the original claim “We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more efficient design;” totally misrepresented evolution, that in fact evolution totally can make sudden-looking jumps (a point which in retrospect I don’t think I properly justified, even if my list of examples was intended that way), and that it’s trivial to demonstrate this by writing a genetic algorithm.
- bitL 7y ago
  Genetic/memetic algorithms are just a rough approximation of a certain selection mechanism we see in the nature, like what Deep Learning is to brain. Making a conclusion that some trivial algorithm with even complicated custom cross-over function can be translated to real-world is as much fantasy as thinking one could upload consciousness to TensorFlow. I never understood how anyone calling themselves a scientist could make such a leap, but obviously it's popular and people made a "scientific" career doing just that...
  - ben_w 7y ago
    > Genetic/memetic algorithms are just a rough approximation of a certain selection mechanism we see in the nature This is irrelevant to my argument. If the simplified version is capable of doing what you have said is unexplained, it is unreasonable to assume that the more complicated version will fail to be capable of the same. > I never understood how anyone calling themselves a scientist could make such a leap, but obviously it's popular and people made a "scientific" career doing just that... Occam’s Razor. Start with the simplest possible model, make a prediction, look carefully at reality to see if you were wrong (an act which is easier the simpler the model), and only update the model when reality disagrees with it. Me coding a genetic algorithm can easily reproduce the entirety of any specific human’s genome if I pick the correct fitness function. Pretty pointless to do so beyond proof of concept, but proof of concept is enough to make the point in this case.

by bitL 7y ago

ben_w 7y ago

Genetic algorithms are a very easy to implement form of AI. The hard part is to create a fitness function which does what you actually want — In the wild, reality and competitors are your fitness function, and none needs to be created; conversely, in a simulation the fitness function is necessarily artificial, and can be made to reach any goal you want, from “compose a song” to “write the rules for an AI for this video game so I don’t have to” to “discover a new superconductor” to “design a clock” to “learn to walk”… etc., and all of those are real examples. Separately, as an algorithm, evolution also has easily characterisable failure modes (local minima), and we do observe those failure modes in organic examples. But, to emphasise, the fact artificial evolution requires us to write our own fitness functions is merely an implementation detail; these algorithms work because evolution works. They produce novel solutions without the authors of the programs creating the solutions.

antisemiotic 7y ago
Humans have a history of occasionally choosing bad fitness functions that predates computers, for example look at the awful things we've done to persian cats or chihuahua dogs.
- ben_w 7y ago
  Well yes. Also, the fact that brains (not even just human ones) influence the real world’s organic evolutionary fitness functions does make it somewhat impossible to perfectly replicate in a computer. Fortunately my point has no dependency on any specific fitness function, natural or programmed — my argument has been that the original claim “We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more efficient design;” totally misrepresented evolution, that in fact evolution totally can make sudden-looking jumps (a point which in retrospect I don’t think I properly justified, even if my list of examples was intended that way), and that it’s trivial to demonstrate this by writing a genetic algorithm.
bitL 7y ago
Genetic/memetic algorithms are just a rough approximation of a certain selection mechanism we see in the nature, like what Deep Learning is to brain. Making a conclusion that some trivial algorithm with even complicated custom cross-over function can be translated to real-world is as much fantasy as thinking one could upload consciousness to TensorFlow. I never understood how anyone calling themselves a scientist could make such a leap, but obviously it's popular and people made a "scientific" career doing just that...
- ben_w 7y ago
  > Genetic/memetic algorithms are just a rough approximation of a certain selection mechanism we see in the nature This is irrelevant to my argument. If the simplified version is capable of doing what you have said is unexplained, it is unreasonable to assume that the more complicated version will fail to be capable of the same. > I never understood how anyone calling themselves a scientist could make such a leap, but obviously it's popular and people made a "scientific" career doing just that... Occam’s Razor. Start with the simplest possible model, make a prediction, look carefully at reality to see if you were wrong (an act which is easier the simpler the model), and only update the model when reality disagrees with it. Me coding a genetic algorithm can easily reproduce the entirety of any specific human’s genome if I pick the correct fitness function. Pretty pointless to do so beyond proof of concept, but proof of concept is enough to make the point in this case.