GreedyAlgorithm comments on The Wonder of Evolution - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 November 2007 08:49PM

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Comment author: GreedyAlgorithm 03 November 2007 08:06:19AM 3 points [-]

To stay unbiased about all of the commenters here, do not visit this link and search the page for names. (sorry, but - wait no, not sorry)

So it seems to me that the smaller you can make a quine in some system with the property that small changes in it mean it produces nearly itself as output, the more likely that system is going to produce replicating evolution-capable things. Or something, I'm making this up as I go along. Is this concept sensical? Is there a computationally feasible way to test anything about it? Has it been discussed over and over?

Maybe we can do far better than evolution, but if we could design a good parallelizable "evolution-friendly" environment and see whether organisms develop that'd still be phenomenal.