4 ms·
I mean, getting there took millennia of evolution, which is a long-time of brute-forcing. It's an incredible and beautiful thing to think about, and it's wilder
by jszymborski 6y ago
I mean, getting there took millennia of evolution, which is a long-time of brute-forcing. It's an incredible and beautiful thing to think about, and it's wilder than any one person's imagination, but I don't know that it's efficient ;)
- ahelwer 6y agoI don't know... look at ATP Synthase, it's basically an electric motor made out of crazy nanotech from the future. Seems pretty efficient to me.
- dllthomas 6y agoWhether the design is efficient is a different question than whether the design process is efficient.
- jszymborski 6y agoYes, this is precisely what I was trying to get at. The process is inefficient in that it takes a long time for it to get to a workable solution, but the solutions are usually incredibly efficient.
- reubenswartz 6y agoYeah, pretty crazy that these things have been turning like mad for billions of years... ;-)
- reubenswartz 6y agoNot saying it's efficient, in the way we would think of "coding" things. One way I like to think of evolution is how long it takes to get from one state to another. So it took hundreds of millions of years for the first "life" to evolve-- perhaps close to a billion. This includes RNA, DNA, ATP, etc. Then it took about a billion-ish years to go from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life. Then about another billion-ish years to get multicellular eukaryotic life. Then it only took about a quarter billion years to have dinosaurs. It only took about 10-20 million years to go from the ancestors of all apes to having chimps, gorillas, and people. (!!!) And when you have people directing evolution, like with dogs or crops, you can make things happen very "quickly".
- Terr_ 6y agoEfficiency tends to come at the cost of not being robust against the unknown. The crazy mutant random number generator might not go fast, but perhaps it's less likely to get stuck...