Gil Dodgen: Uncommonly Dense
Gil Dodgen posted the following over at Uncommon Descent:
All computational evolutionary algorithms artificially isolate the effects of random mutation on the underlying machinery: the CPU instruction set, operating system, and algorithmic processes responsible for the replication process.
If the blind-watchmaker thesis is correct for biological evolution, all of these artificial constraints must be eliminated. Every aspect of the simulation, both hardware and software, must be subject to random errors.
Of course, this would result in immediate disaster and the extinction of the CPU, OS, simulation program, and the programmer, who would never get funding for further realistic simulation experiments.
All I can say is “wow”. Either Dodgen is having us all on (which I doubt, since he’s started a new thread to respond to the charge that he doesn’t know WTF he’s talking about), or he honestly doesn’t understand the difference between the simulated environment and the machine doing the simulating.
Presumably he also believes that when NOAA simulates the effect of a hurricane hitting the Florida coast, they have to pour rain onto their computers. And that every time an orc dies in World of Warcraft, a real orc dies in some distant land.
I know that I’m often too rooted in the concrete and have trouble going from a collection of facts to a general principle, but damn!
October 4th, 2006 at 10:05 am
Is he any relation to Zoe?
October 4th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
facepalm
December 4th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
Holy Crap that was classic.
Thanks for the mammary.
July 4th, 2009 at 2:46 am
Holy crap, facepalm, World of War Craft….. Great intellectual arguments gentlemen.
July 4th, 2009 at 6:28 am
themayan Says:
Because sometimes the stupid is so obvious one can simply leave the brain in neutral. Have anything else to offer, troll?
September 5th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Wow, you don’t realize that the underlying machinery implicitly becomes part of the simulation in genetic algorithms?
This wouldn’t be such a problem if it weren’t for the fact that some people use the (albeit limited) success of computer based genetic algorithms as proof that the creative ability of mutations and natural selection in evolution is practically limitless. There is a high degree of intelligence in the underlying machinery that is swept under the carpet by those who wish to overstate the similarities between computer based computer algorithms and Darwinian evolution.
September 5th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
last sentence, make that “computer based GENETIC algorithms.
September 6th, 2009 at 11:32 am
limboAZ:
So you’re saying that if I were to pour a bucket of water on one of Blizzard’s servers, it would rain in World of Warcraft?
September 6th, 2009 at 11:37 am
limboAZ says:
So what you’re saying is that if I run my GA on a computer running Windows on top of an Intel i7 processor, then rerun the same GA with the same parameters on a computer running Solaris 10 on top of an Ultrasparc III processor I will see different results that can only be attributed to some undefined “intelligence” in the hardware, OS, choice of implementation language, compiler(s), or entropy source?
Since all of the above factors can be accounted for and controlled there should be a way to define the qualities of this “intelligence” and provide a description of it. Let me know how that investigation works out for you.