Treating the boundary between Clippy and gravity as a quantitative one (optimization power over a wide range of targets, as above) rather than a qualitative one does violence to some of my intuitions as well, but on balance I don't endorse those intuitions. Gravity is, technically speaking, an optimization process... though, as you say, it's not worth the name in a colloquial sense.
I find this very unsatisfying, not least because the optimisation power over a wide range of targets is easily gamed just by dividing any given 'target' of a process into a whole lot of smaller targets and then saying "look at all these different targets that the process optimised for!"
Claiming that optimisation power is defined simply by a process's ability to hit some target from a wide range of starting states, and/or has a wide range of targets that it can hit, both seem to be easily gameable by clever sophistry with your choice of how you ch...
Today's post, Aiming at the Target was originally published on 26 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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