Cyan2 comments on Natural Selection's Speed Limit and Complexity Bound - Less Wrong
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Comments (105)
logicnazi,
Wei Dai's post doesn't make sense except in the context of MacKay's paper. If you've read the paper thoroughly, it should be pretty clear what he's talking about.
The fact that the MacKay's fitness function is the distance to a "master" genome has nothing to do with how much information god could convey to someone. It's just a way to model constant environmental conditions, like the sort of thing that has kept modern sharks around since they evolved 100 million years ago.
His model about as simplified as one could get and still have descent with modification and selection, but it's entirely adequate for the limited purpose for which I brought it up in this conversation. That is, it contains the minimal set of features that a system needs to be covered by Eliezer's dictum of 1 bit gained per generation; therefore we can use it to test the assertion just by running the model. This is just what Wei Dai has done -- nothing more and nothing less. In particular, the model has no notion of complexity, but it doesn't need one for us to test Eliezer's assertion.
michael vassar,
"To make the simulation really compelling it has to include some sort of assortative mating."
Meh. Assortive mating can decrease or increase the variance of the progeny, depending on whether the sorting is by similarity or dissimilarity, respectively. I'm happy with random mating as a first step.