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by lunar_mycroft 146 days ago
For this to work, you'd have to fully specify the behavior of your program in the tests. Put another way, at that point your tests are the program. So the question is, which is a more convenient way to specify the behavior of a program: a traditional programming language, or tests written in that language. I think the answer should be fairly obvious.
1 comments
asdff 146 days ago
Behavior does not need to be fully specified at the outset. It could be evaluated after the run. We've actually done this before in our own technology. We studied birds and their flight characteristics, and took lessons from that for airplane development. What is a bird but the output of a random walk algorithm selected by constraints bound by so many latent factors we might never fully grasp?
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lunar_mycroft 146 days ago
> Behavior does not need to be fully specified at the outset. It could be evaluated after the run.

This doesn't work when the software in question is written by competent humans, let alone the sort of random process you describe. A run of the software only tells you the behavior of the software for a given input, it doesn't tell you all possible behaviors of the software. "I ran the code and the output looked good" is no where near sufficient.

> We've actually done this before in our own technology. We studied birds and their flight characteristics, and took lessons from that for airplane development.

There is a vast chasm between "bioinspiration is sometimes a good technique" and "genetic algorithms are a viable replacement for writing code".

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asdff 146 days ago
Genetic algorithms created our species, which are far more complex than anything we have written in computer science. I think they have stood up to the tests of creating a viable product for a given behavior.

And with future compute, you will be able to evaluate behavior across an entire range of inputs for countless putative functions. There will be a time when none of this is compute bound. It is today, but in three centuries or more?

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suddenlybananas 145 days ago
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/student-contributors-did-y...

Evolution ain't all that great.

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troupo 146 days ago
> Genetic algorithms created our species, which are far more complex than anything we have written in computer science. I think they have stood up to the tests of creating a viable product for a given behavior.

Yes, and our species is a fragile barely functioning machinery with an insane number of failing points, and hillariously bad and inefficiently placed components.

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