Martin McClure <martin.mccl...@gemtalksystems.com> writes: > On 01/16/2014 10:58 AM, John Carlson wrote: >> What I was thinking was evolving space travel. If it is a physics >> engine, could it evolve warp drive? Rockets? > > It'd be fun to see rockets evolve. Should be possible; we understand the > physics involved. Warp drive -- well, if we simulate a universe in which > this works, it should be able to evolve. Or teleportation, etc...
Even with a bug-free, sophisticated-enough Physics simulation, completely open-ended evolution is incredibly inefficient. This issue comes up in AI circles, where the question is 'we know that intelligence can evolve, since ours did, so why not evolve our programs the same way?'. The problem is that we took billions of years to emerge from a planet-wide search algorithm; and even so, we're still just a random anomaly (evolution isn't 'trying' to make intelligence). Simulating this would take so many resources that you'd be better off simulating a virtual human brain atom by atom, with enough resources to spare that you could increase its neuron count and processing speed by many orders of magnitude. A similar argument would apply here; if you want advanced technology, the most efficient way to get it is to spend your resources thinking about the problem. If you have enough computing capacity to simulate its evolution, you'd be better off using it to simulate an army of super-scientists. Evolution can be a good approach to very targeted problems with a few degrees of freedom, but it's terrible at anything else. It's only managed to solve the problems of life via the law of large numbers. Regards, Chris _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
