So: what is the difference between real-world biological evolution vs typical genetic algorithms, which leads one to produce modular designs and the other to produce non-modular designs?
I decided to stop here and try to come up with my own answer without reading further.
And first thing that occurred to me is that genome is more like a program that generates the body, that gets scored on fitness function. So, compact program might reuse components a lot when building a body, because it’s compact.
And when people do genetic search, the thing they search on is a body instead of programs that generate it. So it’s easy to tweak any one part of it.
But the answer proposed here is also an interesting one.
I decided to stop here and try to come up with my own answer without reading further.
And first thing that occurred to me is that genome is more like a program that generates the body, that gets scored on fitness function. So, compact program might reuse components a lot when building a body, because it’s compact.
And when people do genetic search, the thing they search on is a body instead of programs that generate it. So it’s easy to tweak any one part of it.
But the answer proposed here is also an interesting one.