[username3]

Has anyone calculated how long flipping bits through an unguided process would take to evolve a function? It seems unlikely as randomly finding a private key or breaking hashes, but how do they compare and what is it like in terms of computing?

[TeMPOraL]

Evolution is not random. It's very much directed by what we like to call "selection pressures". The whole way this process works is that some outcomes are more likely to survive than others.

[duaneb]

I think the equivalent might be something like a beam search or quantum annealing for highly efficient reproduction (local minimum, not absolute) given a hostile environment; selected individually, it's almost certainly an NP-hard problem. However, I don't think this is a productive way to look at evolution: there is no intention, many different evolutionary processes interleave in complicated ways, and selection takes the entire lifetime of the reproduced life form (which may never end!). So it's much more instructive to think of an ecosystem selecting for minimum entropy, IMHO, which is pretty far removed from the genetic level.

[mtdewcmu]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm

[adrianN]

Check this paper by Valiant https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2643031/Valiant_...