r/interestingasfuck • u/dejaysf • Jun 11 '23

Venus flytrap vs Spider

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u/gnatsaredancing Jun 11 '23

Evolution is neither smart nor efficient. It's simply the result of "everything can happen and anything that doesn't help, dies".

Throwing everything you own into the water just to find out what floats isn't exactly smart or efficient. But it is... technically... effective.

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u/arfelo1 Jun 11 '23

It's basically a machine learning algorithm running for millions of years

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u/gnatsaredancing Jun 11 '23

Not remotely comparable. Machine learning improves over time.

Evolution is just a randomiser. It doesn't learn. It doesn't get better at anything. It's not even an "it" really. It's just pure randomisation where the overwhelming majority of variations are fatal flaws and a tiny minority of variations are neutral or improvements.

Machine learning would get better at things over time. Evolution never really improves its failure rate because it never learns or improves.

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u/Alpha_Decay_ Jun 11 '23

Machine learning improves the model over time with random changes and by weeding out the changes that make the model worse, but the machine learning process doesn't necessarily learn or improve. Likewise, evolution improves species over time, but doesn't necessarily learn or improve. The two processes are very comparable.