it might just be trained much faster and hence be more likely to hit on a good solution before the nonmodular network (i.e. just because it’s searching over parameter space at a larger rate).
Or the less modular one can’t train (evolve) as fast when the environment changes. (Or, it changes faster enabling it to travel to different environments.)
Biology kind of does both (modular and integrated), a lot. Like, I want to say part of why the brain is hard to understand is because of how integrated it is. What’s going on in the brain? I saw one answer to this that says ‘it is this complicated in order to obfuscate, to make it harder to hack, this mess has been shaped by parasites, which it is designed to shake off, that is why it is a mess, and might just throw some neurotoxin in there. Why? To kill stiff that’s trying to mess around in there.’ (That is just from memory/reading a reviews on a blog, and you should read the paper/later work https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/705038)
I want to say integrated a) (often) isn’t as good (separating concerns is better), but b) it’s cheaper to re-use stuff, and have it solve multiple purposes. Breathing through the same area you drink water/eat food through can cause issues. But integrating also allows improvements/increased efficiency (although I want to say, in systems people make, it can make it harder to refine or improve the design).
Or the less modular one can’t train (evolve) as fast when the environment changes. (Or, it changes faster enabling it to travel to different environments.)
Biology kind of does both (modular and integrated), a lot. Like, I want to say part of why the brain is hard to understand is because of how integrated it is. What’s going on in the brain? I saw one answer to this that says ‘it is this complicated in order to obfuscate, to make it harder to hack, this mess has been shaped by parasites, which it is designed to shake off, that is why it is a mess, and might just throw some neurotoxin in there. Why? To kill stiff that’s trying to mess around in there.’ (That is just from memory/reading a reviews on a blog, and you should read the paper/later work https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/705038)
I want to say integrated a) (often) isn’t as good (separating concerns is better), but b) it’s cheaper to re-use stuff, and have it solve multiple purposes. Breathing through the same area you drink water/eat food through can cause issues. But integrating also allows improvements/increased efficiency (although I want to say, in systems people make, it can make it harder to refine or improve the design).