Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Natural Selection's Speed Limit and Complexity Bound - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 November 2007 04:54PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 November 2007 10:50:00PM 0 points [-]

Wei Dai, that's the amount of Bayesian information a human observer could extract from a message deliberately encoded into eliminating a very precisely chosen half of the population. It's not the amount of information that's going to end up in the global allele frequencies of a sexually reshuffled gene pool.

I found the MacKay logic disturbingly persuasive. So I wrote a Python program to test the hypothesis; it's now attached to the main article. Increasing the genome size did not increase the supported bits as the square root of the genome size, though I do not totally understand the behavior of this program. The number of supportable bits does seem to go as the log of the number of children per parent. However, one bit of selection working against a 0.1 probability of mutation seems to support 20 bits of information instead of 10 bits, and I'm not really sure why.