= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
JoshuaZ comments on New report: Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (244)
I believe I've seen that discussed before and the answer is just that in real life, proteins don't fold into the lowest-energy conformation. It's like saying that the global minimum energy for soap bubbles is NP-complete. Finding new useful proteins tends to occur via point mutations so that can't be NP-complete either.
This does not follow. It may be that finding new useful proteins just takes a very long time and is very inefficient. The rest of your comment seems correct though.
Then evolution wouldn't happen in real life.
Actually, even that understates the argument. If you can take a 20,000 base sequence and get something useful by point-perturbing at least one of the 20,000 bases in the sequence, then whatever just happened was 50 lightyears from being NP-hard - you only had to search through 19 variants on each of 20,000 cases.
Huh? How does this argument work? That doesn't mean that evolution can't happen in real life, it would be a reason to think that evolution is very slow (which it is!) or that evolution is missing a lot of interesting proteins (which seems plausible).
I'm not sure I follow your logic. Are you arguing that because log 20,000 <19? Yes, you can check every possible position in a base sequence this way, but there are still a lot more proteins than those 19. One doesn't get something special from just changing a specific base. Moreover, even if something interesting does happen for changing a specific one, it might not happen if one changes some other one.
Definitely, since evolution keeps introducing new interesting proteins.
But it's not slow on a scale of e^n for even modestly large n. If you can produce millions of proteins with hundreds to thousands of amino acids in a few billion years, then approximate search for useful proteins is not inefficient like finding the lowest-energy conformation is (maybe polynomial approximation, or the base is much better, or functional chunking lets you effectively reduce n greatly...).
Wait, the fact the evolution is often introducing a interesting new proteins is evidence that evolution is missing a lot of interesting proteins? How does that follow?
Switch the scenario around: if evolution never produced interesting new proteins (anymore, after time T), would that be evidence that there are no other interesting proteins than what evolution produced?
Yes.
That would be evidence that the supply of interesting proteins had been exhausted, just as computer performance at tic-tac-toe and checkers has stopped improving. I don't see where you're coming from here.
Because evolution can't get stuck in the domain of attraction of a local optimum? It always finds any good points?
Edit to add: Intelligent humans can quickly refactor their programs out of poor regions of designspace. Evolution must grope within its neighborhood.
2nd Edit: How about this argument:
"Evolution has stopped producing interesting new ways of flying; therefore, there are probably no other interesting ways of accomplishing flight, since after all, if there were a good way of doing it, evolution would find it."
Point mutations aren't the only way for new things to be produced. You can also recombine large chunks and domains together from multiple previous genes.
Hell, there are even examples of genes evolving via a frame-shift that knocks the 3-base frame of a gene off by one producing a gobbeldygook protein that selection then acts upon...
Carl wasn't commenting on whether it would be very strong evidence but whether it would be evidence.