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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: 0.203s | 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. JKCalhoun ◴[17 Oct 24 14:05 UTC] No.41869807[source]▶
I remember early "computer recreations" of life that seemed to suggest that unbounded randomness (mutation) was, as you mention, more often bad than good. Sexual reproduction, where genes are swapped (perhaps at random?) got you to the head of the class much, much quicker.