I agree with this. Brute force searching AI did not seem to be a relevant possibility to me prior to reading this chapter and this comment, and now it does.
One more thought/concern regarding the evolutionary approach:
Humans perform poorly when estimating the cost and duration of software projects, particularly as the size and complexity of the project grows. Recapitulating evolution is a large project, and so it wouldn’t be at all surprising if it ended up requiring more compute time and person-hours than expected, pushing out the timeline for success via this approach.
While humans do perform poorly estimating time to complete projects, I expect that only adds a factor of two or something, which is fairly small next to the many order of magnitude uncertainty around the cost.
I agree with this. Brute force searching AI did not seem to be a relevant possibility to me prior to reading this chapter and this comment, and now it does.
One more thought/concern regarding the evolutionary approach: Humans perform poorly when estimating the cost and duration of software projects, particularly as the size and complexity of the project grows. Recapitulating evolution is a large project, and so it wouldn’t be at all surprising if it ended up requiring more compute time and person-hours than expected, pushing out the timeline for success via this approach.
While humans do perform poorly estimating time to complete projects, I expect that only adds a factor of two or something, which is fairly small next to the many order of magnitude uncertainty around the cost.