Ah, that does help, thanks. In my words: A search process that is vulnerable to local minima doesn’t necessarily contain a secondary search process, because it might not be systematically comparing local minima and choosing between them according to some criteria. It just goes for the first one it falls for, or maybe slightly more nuanced, the first sufficiently big one it falls for.
By contrast, in the ball rolling example you gave, the walls/ridges were competing with each other, such that the “best” one (or something like that) would be systematically selected by the ball, rather than just the first one or the first-sufficiently-big one.
So in that case, looking over your list again...
OK, I think I see how organic life arising from chemistry is an example of a secondary search process. It’s not just a local minima that chemistry found itself in, it’s a big competition between different kinds of local minima. And now I think I see how this would go in the other examples too. As I originally said in my top-level comment, I’m not sure this applies to the example I brought up, actually. Would the “Insert my name as the author of all useful heuristics” heuristic be outcompeted by something else eventually, or not? I bet not, which indicates that it’s a “mere” local minima and not one that is part of a broader secondary search process.
Ah, that does help, thanks. In my words: A search process that is vulnerable to local minima doesn’t necessarily contain a secondary search process, because it might not be systematically comparing local minima and choosing between them according to some criteria. It just goes for the first one it falls for, or maybe slightly more nuanced, the first sufficiently big one it falls for.
By contrast, in the ball rolling example you gave, the walls/ridges were competing with each other, such that the “best” one (or something like that) would be systematically selected by the ball, rather than just the first one or the first-sufficiently-big one.
So in that case, looking over your list again...
OK, I think I see how organic life arising from chemistry is an example of a secondary search process. It’s not just a local minima that chemistry found itself in, it’s a big competition between different kinds of local minima. And now I think I see how this would go in the other examples too. As I originally said in my top-level comment, I’m not sure this applies to the example I brought up, actually. Would the “Insert my name as the author of all useful heuristics” heuristic be outcompeted by something else eventually, or not? I bet not, which indicates that it’s a “mere” local minima and not one that is part of a broader secondary search process.