[jfoutz]

You quoted this part,

> Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

But then seemed to indicate evolution disagrees.

I might be misunderstanding your point, but it sure seems like, evolution tries a bunch of stuff, and whatever reproduces kinda wins.

That seems like, take chances, make mistakes, get messy. That seems like the core of evolution.

Could you clarify or refine what you’re saying? The two seem at odds.

[zb3]

So that was a bad quote, I only wanted to address the part that mentioned monotonic-only improvement, since to me, evolution has achieved more than I'd imagine, evolving organs like the eye incrementally.

I got inspired by this article: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/05/why-does-biologi...

[Rhapso]

Basically, the root disagreement was "monotonic improvement". Evolution is awesome, but it couldn't work with only monotonic improvement.

I used to do an "optimization" on my genetic algorithms. I'd ensure the highest scoring genome of the last population was a member of the new one. It made sure every single generation improved or stood still.

It was a good idea to keep a copy of the "best" genome around for final output, but by keeping it in the search space, I was damaging the ability of the algorithm to do it's job by dragging the search space constantly back to the most recent local optima.