This is wonderful. I'm reading this series as I use codex to build an application and I keep ignoring codex's "i'm finished" pings to read and reread sections multiple times. It takes some really interesting writing to get me to ignore the next dev prompt. :)
"Any system that has to learn by acting inside a world it does not fully know is forced to strike this balance somewhere, and here it is at the very bottom of the tree of life, implemented not as a decision but as a coin flip built into a genetic circuit." - This is as fascinating to me now reading your essay as it was when I learned about genetic algorithms mimicking some of the processes you are describing. The entire speed and effectiveness of the algorithm could be controlled by the percentage of random mutations. Too much or not enough randomness could be equally catastrophic.
Also makes me want to make a joke about "God doesn't play with dice" quote (although that's from another opera) :))
Your instinct about the mutation rate is more literally right than you might expect. In evolutionary theory it has a name and a hard edge: the error threshold. Push the mutation rate past a critical value and selection can no longer hold the signal against the noise, the accumulated adaptation gets washed out, and the population melts back into random sequences. Eigen called it error catastrophe. Below the threshold you get the other failure, the one you also named: too little randomness and the population parks itself on a local optimum and never leaves. So it isn't a matter of taste in tuning. There is a cliff on one side and a trap on the other, and life runs remarkably close to the cliff.
As for the dice: Einstein lost that argument, and the bacteria had settled it a few billion years earlier.
Despite being a genius he was a human too :)) And we humans just have a hard time accepting randomness as a feature and not a bug. I don't blame the guy :))
superb essay....looking forward to reading the whole series...
This is wonderful. I'm reading this series as I use codex to build an application and I keep ignoring codex's "i'm finished" pings to read and reread sections multiple times. It takes some really interesting writing to get me to ignore the next dev prompt. :)
What a great read!
"Any system that has to learn by acting inside a world it does not fully know is forced to strike this balance somewhere, and here it is at the very bottom of the tree of life, implemented not as a decision but as a coin flip built into a genetic circuit." - This is as fascinating to me now reading your essay as it was when I learned about genetic algorithms mimicking some of the processes you are describing. The entire speed and effectiveness of the algorithm could be controlled by the percentage of random mutations. Too much or not enough randomness could be equally catastrophic.
Also makes me want to make a joke about "God doesn't play with dice" quote (although that's from another opera) :))
Thanks, glad it landed.
Your instinct about the mutation rate is more literally right than you might expect. In evolutionary theory it has a name and a hard edge: the error threshold. Push the mutation rate past a critical value and selection can no longer hold the signal against the noise, the accumulated adaptation gets washed out, and the population melts back into random sequences. Eigen called it error catastrophe. Below the threshold you get the other failure, the one you also named: too little randomness and the population parks itself on a local optimum and never leaves. So it isn't a matter of taste in tuning. There is a cliff on one side and a trap on the other, and life runs remarkably close to the cliff.
As for the dice: Einstein lost that argument, and the bacteria had settled it a few billion years earlier.
Despite being a genius he was a human too :)) And we humans just have a hard time accepting randomness as a feature and not a bug. I don't blame the guy :))