That’s very cool, thanks for making it. At first I was worried that this meant that my model didn’t rely on selection effects. Then I tried a few different random seeds, and some, like 1725, didn’t show demon-like behaviour. So I think we’re still good.
Hmm, the inherent 1d nature of the visualization kinda makes it difficult to check for selection effects. I’m not convinced that’s actually what’s going on here. 1725 is special because the ridges of the splotch function are exactly orthogonal to x0. The odds of this happening probably go down exponentially with dimensionality. Furthermore, with more dakka, one sees that the optimization rate drops dramatically after ~15000 time steps, and may or may not do so again later. So I don’t think this proves selection effects are in play. An alternative hypothesis is simply that the process gets snagged by the first non-orthogonal ridge it encounters, without any serous selection effects coming into play.
Now this is one of the more interesting things I’ve come across.
I fiddled around with the code a bit and was able to reproduce the phenomenon with DIMS = 1, making visualisation possible:
Behold!
Here’s the code I used to make the plot:
That’s very cool, thanks for making it. At first I was worried that this meant that my model didn’t rely on selection effects. Then I tried a few different random seeds, and some, like 1725, didn’t show demon-like behaviour. So I think we’re still good.
Hmm, the inherent 1d nature of the visualization kinda makes it difficult to check for selection effects. I’m not convinced that’s actually what’s going on here. 1725 is special because the ridges of the splotch function are exactly orthogonal to x0. The odds of this happening probably go down exponentially with dimensionality. Furthermore, with more dakka, one sees that the optimization rate drops dramatically after ~15000 time steps, and may or may not do so again later. So I don’t think this proves selection effects are in play. An alternative hypothesis is simply that the process gets snagged by the first non-orthogonal ridge it encounters, without any serous selection effects coming into play.