This is as good an opportunity as any to link this presentation and thesecoolpapers about evolving patches for real-world C programs in minutes. In light of an actual working example of a computer program that fixes other programs’ bugs, broad brush claims about how programs can’t have algorithmic insight, won’t lead to correct programs, and lack “the redundancy or flexibility of genetics” won’t really wash.
This research (it is a single piece of research written up in 4 different ways) simply concerns taking a rough piece of wood (a program that is almost correct) and sanding down the edges (fixing a small number of test cases). I didn’t say “programs can’t have algorithmic insight”, I said randomly generating problems by “evolutionary” means will not contain insight by any other means than coincidence. The research you linked doesn’t contradict that because all it concerns is smoothing down rough edges. Degeneracy is one of the fundamental features of a genetic code that is required for the theory of evolution to apply so I don’t know why you say that “doesn’t wash”, it’s a fact.
This is as good an opportunity as any to link this presentation and these cool papers about evolving patches for real-world C programs in minutes. In light of an actual working example of a computer program that fixes other programs’ bugs, broad brush claims about how programs can’t have algorithmic insight, won’t lead to correct programs, and lack “the redundancy or flexibility of genetics” won’t really wash.
This research (it is a single piece of research written up in 4 different ways) simply concerns taking a rough piece of wood (a program that is almost correct) and sanding down the edges (fixing a small number of test cases). I didn’t say “programs can’t have algorithmic insight”, I said randomly generating problems by “evolutionary” means will not contain insight by any other means than coincidence. The research you linked doesn’t contradict that because all it concerns is smoothing down rough edges. Degeneracy is one of the fundamental features of a genetic code that is required for the theory of evolution to apply so I don’t know why you say that “doesn’t wash”, it’s a fact.
Degeneracy is an important feature of DNA-based evolution (biological evolution as-it-is) but it’s not fundamental to evolution as-it-could-be.