Side/Comments on What if Design is Compatible with Evolution

[Dan_Eastwood]

@Roy, playing by my own rules, here are my thoughts, please quote or steal as you see fit.

@Rope

Jeavons probably does not mention those examples, because his article is a response to / evaluation of my book in which I do also point out examples of genetic algorithms producing designs that were unanticipated. So there was no need to talk about examples that we both agree about, given that this does not change the conclusions in any way - you still need plenty of design expertise to get such algorithms to produce interesting results. I hope you can give Jeavons the benefit of the doubt, since he is an expert in this field. See his details here .

That statement is incorrect. GAs always produce results, but often not the result desired by the programmer. Expertise is needed to corral them into a particular task, but this presumes a programmer. Rope is making a prior assumption of design, not following evidence to design. I might comment for myself on this Bayesian angle.

Never in ID literature is the incredible efficiency of GAs considered “Big O of N*log(N)”, thanks to massively parallel processing. [I will find a citation for that]

There are more recent results for GAs being used to create computer code that should be cited - I’ll look for that too.