On Sun, May 29, 2016 at 05:38:59PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: > >On Friday, May 27, 2016 at 3:58:11 AM UTC+10, John Clark wrote: > >Richard Dawkins said "The theory of evolution by cumulative > >natural selection is the only theory we know of that is, in > >principle, capable of explaining the existence of organized > >complexity." > > This is just ridiculous. Elementary arithmetic leads to all possible > levels of complexity, from computable linear and polynomial to the > degrees of unsolvability (sigma_i, pi_i, delta_i, i = 0, 1, ...). > > Some percolation process, some universal cellular automata, or > simply the Mandelbrot set, illustrate also how complexity can arise > from very simple iteration of very simple number (natural, or not) > number relations. >
I am ambivalent on this. Technically, measuring complexity by means of a Turing machine, as in Kolmogorov-Chaitin-Solomonoff complexity, an algorithmic process such as your examples above cannot lead to an increase of complexity. The only way we can say that the aforementioned examples lead to an increase in complexity is if the algorithmic process in question remained forever cryptic to the observer measuring the complexity. I don't any form of proof that a learning process cannot learn the underlying algorithm of say the evolution of a Mandelbrot set. On the other hand, if the process involved were genuinely random, and even your FPI satisfies this, then evolution operating on it will generate plenty of complexity. It is a reasonable hypothesis, though by no means proven, that evolution is the only possible sort of process that can create complexity. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow [email protected] Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
