Re: We believe in design

--- "Dr. David Campbell" <amblema@bama.ua.edu> wrote:
> > So ... to return back to my original point - if
> the space of viable
> > phenotypes were densely populated (designed that
> way as Glenn said in
> > his article) so there were caverns of viability
> connected by viable
> > paths, then evolutionary search can work, and
> indeed the neutrality
> > idea would improve the efficiency of that search
> by spreading out
> > over neutral networks.
>
> If much of the theoretical space is significantly
> worse than the region of interest, this may help
the
> search work more efficiently, because many
suboptimal
> options can quickly be eliminated. This also
> means that a uniform sampling of the space is not a
> very good approach.

yes, yes, yes. One of several objections to Dembski's
latest displacement argument includes the uniform
sampling of space.

Check out the work by Tom English
http://www.tomenglishproject.com/

[quote]Under the theorems’ assumption of a uniform
distribution of problems, an uninformed optimizer is
optimal. To be 99.99% sure of getting a solution
better than 99.999% of all candidate solutions, it
suffices to draw a uniform sample of just 921,029
solutions. Optimization is a benign problem with rare
instances that are hard. Dembski increases the
incidence of difficult instances by stipulating
“interesting problems.” At that point it is no longer
clear which NFL theorems he believes apply.
Incidentally, an optimizer cannot tune itself to the
problem instance while solving it, but its parameters
can be tuned to the problem distribution from run to
run. It is possible to automate adaptation of an
optimizer to the problem distribution without
teleology.[/quote]
http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/000257.html

There's some fascinating material out there to be 'digested'
Received on Tue May 31 23:39:18 2005