Well… not necessarily. We’re talking here about a wheel, with weights on it, rolling down a ramp. Mathematically, this system just isn’t all that complicated. Anyone with an undergrad-level understanding of mechanics can just crank the math, in all of its glory. Take no shortcuts, double-check any approximations, do it right. It’d be tedious, but certainly not intractable. And then… then you’d understand the system.
I guess the idea was to emulate a problem without a established theory, and it was chosen to provide a simple setup for changing the parameters and visualizing the results.
Imagine that instead of this physics problem it was like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s problem to find the rule that explain a sequence of numbers, where you cannot find someone who already developed a solution for it. It is easier to generate a set of numbers that satisfies the rule (similar to the iterative optimization) than the rule/theory itself, as each of those proposed rules are falsified by the next iterations.
If it was modified to generate an output to be maximized instead of a true/false answer, the iterative optimization would get a good result faster, but not the optimal solution. If you played this game several times, the optimizers would probably get good heuristic to find a good solution, while the theorizers might find a meta-solution that solves all the games.
For me it looks like that if that experiment was extended to more iterations (and maybe some different configurations of communication between each generation and between independent groups) you would get a simple model of how science progress. Theory pays in the long term, but it might be hindered if the scientist refuse to abandon their proposed/inherited solution.
I guess the idea was to emulate a problem without a established theory, and it was chosen to provide a simple setup for changing the parameters and visualizing the results.
Imagine that instead of this physics problem it was like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s problem to find the rule that explain a sequence of numbers, where you cannot find someone who already developed a solution for it. It is easier to generate a set of numbers that satisfies the rule (similar to the iterative optimization) than the rule/theory itself, as each of those proposed rules are falsified by the next iterations.
If it was modified to generate an output to be maximized instead of a true/false answer, the iterative optimization would get a good result faster, but not the optimal solution. If you played this game several times, the optimizers would probably get good heuristic to find a good solution, while the theorizers might find a meta-solution that solves all the games.
For me it looks like that if that experiment was extended to more iterations (and maybe some different configurations of communication between each generation and between independent groups) you would get a simple model of how science progress. Theory pays in the long term, but it might be hindered if the scientist refuse to abandon their proposed/inherited solution.