It'd love to see the same example with a regulator generating incorrectly programmed sorters. How does the system handle a programmer bug that inverted the sort direction?
This brings up a really interesting point. If the right mutations happen, we could get a machine that eats other machines and reproduces indefinitely. In other words, X-Rays can give this machine cancer.
then you'd debug it, or program debuggers to flit around looking for programmer error then address it
the system is clear about its capabilities regarding 'correctness'
which seems to imply the programmer's job is to optimise with those built in inaccuracies
but what those inaccuracies afford is what ackley is calling robustness and indefinite scalability
ackley addresses your question directly with a sorting comparison(o) from a later video
the graph fails to exhibit where maxwell's demon(i) horde sort would express itself on the graph, but sorting corruption is addressed in the paper(ii)
The demon horde sort’s performance may be just adequate,
by that measure, but its robustness seems quite impressive.
Figure 23 shows results of one experiment in which we
randomly corrupted site memory with simulated bit errors at
a range of probabilities. Each error occurrence selects a random
site and then flips from one to eight of its 64 atomic bits.
We can see that while channel length helps performance, it
does not help robustness against this system perturbation—
but the system is strikingly robust anyway, tolerating upward
of 10 multibit corruptions per million events with essentially
no visible performance degradation, regardless of channel
length.
Above about 50 errors/Mevent the system reliably falls
apart—and the pathology appears to run a reliable course..
unintended performance appears to be the reason for the advent of this system
but going further as to deal with unintended performance of hardware
if you have a multi core system running an incorrectly programmed sort and one core fails the whole thing shuts down, but an incorrectly programmed sorter in the demon horde will keep functioning even with failed cores, affording the opportunity to adjust while performing