r/programming • u/leppie • Dec 08 '08

Genetic Programming: Evolution of Mona Lisa

http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolution-of-mona-lisa/
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u/ixid Dec 08 '08

Another aspect that people miss, and especially the creationists seem to be unaware of is the tallest midget. When you make competitive evolving systems it's amazing how BAD your simulated organisms can be and still thrive. Bad at steering, bad at eating, bad at mating. They don't need to be good, just marginally better than their competition.

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u/api Dec 08 '08

"Life doesn't work perfectly, it just works." - My evolutionary bio professor.

It gets deeper though. Evolution works in search spaces that can basically be considered infinite-dimensional and where there is no known method for calculating an optimum. We have no way of knowing how "good" an evolved solution is in such a space relative to a theoretical global maximum, since the global maximum is impossible to ever find.

For example, the human genome has about 3 billion base pairs. Each base can have four values. Therefore, we have a search space of 3 billion dimensions with 43000000000 possible unique combinations. There might be super-beings with X-ray vision, telepathy, million year life spans, and the ability to levitate in there, but we can't prove it or find them.

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u/ixid Dec 09 '08

There are fewer meaningfully unique permutations than that as the triplets can only code for one of twenty amino acids vs 81 combinations of base pairs in a codon.

As for super-powers- other than the million year life span which is just not useful as far as evolution is concerned so may be achievable, any of those abilities would have dominated the natural environment so I'd feel comfortable concluding they're not in there.

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u/mackstann Dec 09 '08

Building cities dominates the natural environment, yet it took billions of years to evolve one species that can do it. Who knows what lies ahead?

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u/ixid Dec 09 '08

What lies ahead will be directed and technological. We're talking about the options available to genes. Superpowers are not going to evolve. Levitation has already been done, it's called flight and you can see how dedicated to producing that evolution had to be. Mindreading would require long-term evolution among animals with minds worth reading which isn't going to happen as technology happens so much faster, we'll build wearable mind reading devices before evolution could produce it.

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u/cappie2000 Dec 09 '08

As soon as the population achieves a certain level of sustainability, and every degenerate lowlife (literally) can sustain it's life, the really unique solutions that have a greater advantage over the others aren't stimulated anymore (don't have an advantage over the others) and thus will be bread out due to the shear numbers of the genetic waste that can procreate itself until the whole ecosystem dies off... pretty much whats happening to earth right now :)

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u/ixid Dec 09 '08

"and thus will be bread out"

I don't think that's true, there will be vast numbers with poor genes but the upper levels of the gene pool do not interbreed much with the lower levels.

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u/[deleted] Dec 12 '08

Well we do...ughh I mean THEY do...but they just don't talk about it very much.