Define a metric for "did well at the task". Whatever you define will be, at best, a close proxy to what you want. The downfall of an organization lies in that g

Define a metric for "did well at the task". Whatever you define will be, at best, a close proxy to what you want. The downfall of an organization lies in that gap. Evolution fails spectacularly badly at matching our intuitions for what we want. A naive optimization process will optimize exactly for the cost function, at the expense of everything else in the universe. This is to say that what you propose is not that easy to accomplish when you get beyond the domain of words and into the implementation. I found this an entertaining read on why allowing an evolutionary process to optimize for you does not always lead to the results you expect: http://lesswrong.com/lw/l8/conjuring_an_evolution_to_serve_you/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/l8/conjuring_an_evolution_to_serve_y...