cryptoguru
Posts: 53
Joined: Jan. 2015
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Wes, it seems either you're not able to see the issue here or you really don't want to. It's a simple issue to understand.
Pretending that rewarding the organism for achieving a target is a natural thing, is cheating when you have an algorithm that is testing the organism to see if it passes a specific test. In doing this you are biasing the organisms that you know are approaching a known solution.
AVIDA has made it so that the test for reward is a known building block of the final solution. This would be like having an exhaustive list of component parts that we know could build an airplane if we had the correct amount in the correct order. We would never expect to randomly be able to vary the list and order of components as well as assembly instructions to get the final result, so we work on assembling simple modules; small modules containing a few components. We optimise the search for components that build modules that we know are needed for the airplane. If the algorithm manages to create a component by chance, we reward the algorithm that produced it so that it out-survives the other algorithms that have not found a component. Before long we should expect to have a few modules that may work together to perform another task that we were expecting.
This algorithm could work (if a module can be made with a small amount of components) and a functional collection of modules would also need to only require a small number of modules.
This is how AVIDA is working ... it knows the modules that are needed, and it knows the final possible collective-module functions ... so it enforces targets. AVIDA also has known logical functions that don't require many commands in the correct order. Remember most of the commands in AVIDA are commutative, so a lot of the time (for boolean logic) the order of commands is not important (e.g. 1 & 0 & 1 & 1 can be re-written in any order). Therefore AVIDA has it easier than the airplane, because there is not an infinite number of ways of building a known physical module for an airplane that is functional. Also we known that finding logical functions that are a combination of commands is of a low order of complexity (tens of commands, not thousands) ... this matters, as the difficulty in finding a combination to reward will exponentiate as the problem space increases. Nevertheless, the enforced target both at the logical function level and the final solution level is artificial and enforced by the intelligence of the algorithm ... you can pretend it's modelling feeding, movement or some other natural advantage, but this is no more a natural advantage than sending a random sequence of words to a speech engine and when you get a few words together that make sense by comparing with known sentences play that through speakers and claim that the computer is artificially intelligent.
I understand that for your world-view to be correct this is a CORE issue, you need to be able to show that information can arise automatically. It's pretty obvious that's not what's happening here. I don't expect you to agree with me ... that would be equivalent to you saying that natural processes can't or haven't been observed to bring specified complexity out of random noise without intelligent interaction. That ain't gonna happen, unless you find Jesus and have a conversion experience and change your mind to believe in a creator ... then you may find your mind is open to more rational argument.
As I've said before, my world-view permits things that both arise through natural mechanisms and those that can arise through supernatural (outside of our physical universe) causation. You cannot permit supernatural causation in your world-view, so you must explain everything through natural causation, even if it doesn't naturally fit. Who has the closed mind? The evidence and the logic points in the direction of intelligent causation of information ... you're trying to argue that problem-solving designs can emerge from noise. I sure hope you don't work in engineering or software dev :-)
Ironically, I bet you are willing to accept the "supernatural" causation of other universes or dimensions outside of our own measurable and observable universe to answer difficult cosmological questions about origins ... but just not an intelligence ... presumably because you may have to account to them for your actions.
I think we're done here, and yes you've answered some questions, but not with satisfactory answers; you've ducked and dived the key points. I have admitted the part I had presumed and got wrong (about AVIDA being linear), can you admit your incorrect presumptions?
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