Great find! A good example of why we software engineers find ID so obvious.
Our analysis of relevant literature shows that no one has succeeded at evolving nontrivial software from scratch; in other words, the Darwinian algorithm works in theory but does not work in practice, when applied in the domain of software production. The reason we do not evolve software is that the space of working programs is very large and discrete. Although hill-climbing heuristic–based evolutionary computations are excellent at solving many optimization problems, they fail in the domains of noncontinuous fitness.87 This is also the reason we do not evolve complex alife or novel engineering designs. With respect to our 2 predictions, we can conclude that (1) simulations of evolution do not produce comparably complex artifacts and (2) running EAs longer leads to progressively diminishing results. With respect to the 3 falsifiability conditions, we observe that all 3 are true as of this writing. Likewise, neither the longest-running EA nor the most complex-evolved algorithm nor the most complex digital organism are a part of our common cultural knowledge. This is not an unrealistic expectation as successful software programs, such as Deep Blue88 or Alpha Go,89,90 are well known to the public.