There's some discussion in the original thread about what exactly counts as optimising but it doesn't seem to have had any result, and I confess I'm struggling to find a definition of optimisation that says "definitely optimisation" about human minds and Deep Blue and evolution, but "definitely not optimisation" about a rock sitting on the ground or water running down a hill, and which feels like I have actually made a reduction instead of just something circular or synonymous.
Does anybody have a good working definition of optimisation that captures the things that feel optimisationy?
Optimization is a hypothesis. It's a complex hypothesis. You get evidence in favor of the hypothesis that water is an optimization process when you see it avoiding local minimums and steering itself to the lowest possible place on earth.
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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