Kenneth Stanley: uncertainty

Transcript context

…And I wanted to kinda jump in, you know, along this line of not understanding evolution completely. I wanna put in another dimension, which is which is very well known and just almost anything in the natural world, but certainly with life, which is energy constraints. You know, there are these very heavy constraints on resources, on energy, on material, etcetera, that life has to endure in order to survive. And so, again, I'm I'm gonna beat on my parsimony slash simplicity sort of drum here and just get your thoughts on that, which is that it isn't just open endedness. It's not just divergence. I think there are other aspects to natural evolution, 1 of these being the constraint to use less resources, less energy, simplicity of solution. Like, do you think that's fair? Like, is that another important dimension? I think it's it's, you know, part of the survival constraint. So I think you you could think of it as as part of the function of that compute survival, whatever survival is. Like, to the extent that efficiency is important for survival, then you're gonna stay in regions that are relatively efficient. And so that that is having some effect on representation. But, you know, similar, like in PickBreeder, you know, there's less of this perhaps concern for efficiency that's at least not as explicit. It could be implicit in the sense that that, you know, users perceive evolvability and like it. So, like, users get a sense that, oh, this thing is really malleable, and so I I'm gonna keep playing and exploring in this area. And may maybe that's a side effect of being efficient in some sense that it's that it's so evolvable, but it's an it's an indirect correlation. I mean, it's it's not, like, exactly explicit that necessarily efficiency equals evolvability. It could be though something implicit and indirect. And so I think I think overall, it's it's like Akash said, there's still some unknowns here about what actually what actually matters, what doesn't matter, especially with respect to the representation. You know? Because, like, we're we're having kind of 2 conversations at once. 1 is, like, what is the best metaphor for biological evolution? But then it's actually not the key question. The key question is just what leads to these really nice representations. It might not actually have to be a perfect metaphor. Right.…

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