Thanks for a great post! I have a small confusion/nit regarding natural selection. Despite its name, I don’t think it’s a good exemplar of a selection process. Going through the features of a selection process from the start of the post:
can directly instantiate any element of the search space. No: natural selection can only make local modifications to previously instantiated points. But you already dealt with this local search issue in Choices Don’t Change Later Choices.
gets direct feedback on the quality of each element. Yes.
quality of element does not depend on previous choices. No, the evaluation of an element in natural selection depends a great deal on previous choices because they usually make up important parts of its environment. I think this is the thrust of the claim that natural selection is online (which I agree with).
only the final output matters. No? From the perspective of natural selection, I think the quality of the current output is what matters.
I’d love to know why natural selection seemed obvious as an example of a selection process, since it did not to me due to its poor score on the checklist above.
Thanks for a great post! I have a small confusion/nit regarding natural selection. Despite its name, I don’t think it’s a good exemplar of a selection process. Going through the features of a selection process from the start of the post:
can directly instantiate any element of the search space. No: natural selection can only make local modifications to previously instantiated points. But you already dealt with this local search issue in Choices Don’t Change Later Choices.
gets direct feedback on the quality of each element. Yes.
quality of element does not depend on previous choices. No, the evaluation of an element in natural selection depends a great deal on previous choices because they usually make up important parts of its environment. I think this is the thrust of the claim that natural selection is online (which I agree with).
only the final output matters. No? From the perspective of natural selection, I think the quality of the current output is what matters.
I’d love to know why natural selection seemed obvious as an example of a selection process, since it did not to me due to its poor score on the checklist above.