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I believe the intention was simply to illustrate that complexity can evolve from simplicity. It's quite a bit more difficult to build a working example that rel
by joshuak 6y ago
I believe the intention was simply to illustrate that complexity can evolve from simplicity. It's quite a bit more difficult to build a working example that relies on actual natural selection.
- yters 6y agoThe problem is that complexity is not emerging. It is being injected externally through the human input, so contradicts Dawkin's argument.
- joshuak 6y agoThe complexity is absolutely emergent, the person selecting can easily see that selecting the same offspring every time is just as likely to produce complex results as carefully curating the offspring selection. Dawkins example is just a mediocre programmers attempt to point at the idea, there are many other more competent examples in computer science. Cellular automata such as Conway's game of life being a painfully obvious example. I get the impression you are trying not to understand so as to be able to disagree, rather than trying to understand and then disagreeing. Regardless of the motivations, working to avoid understanding has never been a winning strategy, at least in the long run.
- yters 6y agolet's take conway's CA as an example in that case you only get complex functionality through human engineering if you just dump a bunch of random pixels on the screen you'll get nifty looking chaos and some simple mechanisms like gliders but to get something like game of life in the game of life, you need incredibly complex human engineering i am really trying to understand, and have purchased and am reading through dawkins book but the logic just does not seem to go through