Biological Evolution and Information Acquisition

101 4 3 Share A few weeks ago we looked at a simulation of technological evolution by economist Brian Arthur, in which he was able to start with simple building blocks (such as a NAND gate) and evolve surprisingly complex circuits (such as a 12-way AND gate or a 4-bit adder) by randomly combining increasingly useful existing components. We analyzed this as a way of simplifying a search problem: by using existing, working components as modules that can be combined, a few at a time, into more complex modules, and then combining those into even more complex modules, many unpromising and time-consuming branches of the search tree are screened off, and the simulation can find useful technologies amidst an enormous branching set of possibilities.