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Why birds do not fall while sleeping

(news.cnrs.fr)
230 points mdp2021 | 1 comments | 15 Oct 24 08:56 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Crazyontap ◴[17 Oct 24 03:05 UTC] No.41866060[source]▶
When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in the intelligent design theory.

However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.

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TrainedMonkey ◴[17 Oct 24 04:43 UTC] No.41866478[source]▶
AFAIK key insight into evolution is not randomness but rather sheer amount of compute. Specifically, evolution is a massively parallel flood algorithm that will try every single mutation. Barely any of them will have positive impact on organism fitness, but some will.
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1. TeMPOraL ◴[17 Oct 24 06:47 UTC] No.41867041[source]▶
That, and of course the other key insight is the "flood algorithm" part. I.e. evolution isn't about randomness (the "throw some parts into a bag and spin them until a 747 flies out" criticism), it's about bias and feedback: the environment itself isn't uniform, creating a bias in what would otherwise be entirely uniform selection, one which compounds with every generation. Randomness is just adding variance here, jitter preventing the process from getting stuck with one outcome.