p.38-39 consider what your attitude would be towards a theory that purported to show how the number 7 had
once been an even number, long, long ago, and had gradually acquired its oddness through an arrangement whereby it exchanged
some properties with the ancestors of the number 10 (which had once been a prime number). Utter nonsense, of course. Inconceivable.
Darwin knew that a parallel attitude was deeply ingrained among his contemporaries, and that he would have
to labor mightily to overcome it... he more or less conceded that the elder authorities of his day would tend to be
as immutable as the species they believed in
p.39 Darwin's project in Origin can be divided in two: to prove that modern species were
revised descendants of earlier species - species had evolved - and to show how this process of "descendant with modification"
had occurred.
p.41 However tiny the advantage in question, if it was actually an advantage... it would tip the scales
in favor of those who held it.
p.41-42 Darwin's dangerous idea, the idea that generates so much insight, turmoil, confusion,
anxiety - is thus actually quite simple. Darwin summarizes it in two long sentences at the end of chapter 4 of Origin:
If during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the
several parts of their organization, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometrical powers
of increase of each species, at some age, season, or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed;
then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of
existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would
be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each being's own welfare, in the same way as so many
variations have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus
characterized will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance
they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized.
p.65 in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it...
Exactly! Darwin's "strange inversion of reasoning" was in fact a new and wonderful way of thinking
p.128 In chess, when there is only one way of staving off disaster, it is called a forced move... It is
simply dead obvious that there is one and only one solution.
p.194 In Artificial Intelligence, a prized strategy is to work on deliberately simplified versions of the
phenomena of interest. These are engagingly called "toy problems."
p.209 What would a good evaluation function look like?... The search space is Vast, so the method of search
must be "heuristic" - the branching tree of all possible moves has to be ruthlessly pruned by semi-intelligent, myopic demons,
leading to a risky, chance-ridden exploration of a tiny subportion of the whole space.
Heuristic search is one of the foundational ideas of Artificial Intelligence.
p.210 Samuel saw that the Vast space of checkers could only be feasibly explored by a process that
riskily pruned the search tree, but how do you go about constructing the pruning and choosing demons to do this job? What
readily programmable stop-looking-now rules or evaluation functions would have a better-than-chance power to grow a search
tree in wise directions? Samuel... proceeded empirically, beginning by devising ways of mechanizing whatever obvious rules
of thumb he could think of.
p.211 The final system [Samuel's computer checkers program, circa 1962] - the one that beat [checkers expert]
Nealy - was a Rube Goldberg amalgam of rote learning, kludges, and products of self-design that were quite inscrutable to
Samuel himself.
p.222-223 Adaptive evolution is a search process - driven
by mutation, recombination, and selection - on fixed or deforming fitness landscapes. An adapting population flows
over the landscape under these forces. The structure of such landscapes, smooth or rugged, governs the evolvability
of populations and the sustained fitness of their members. The structure of fitness landscapes inevitably imposes
limitations on adaptive search. [Kauffman 1993, p. 118.]
p.252-253 as soon as other (maxima-seeking) agents are included in the environment, strikingly different
methods of analysis are required:
A guiding principle cannot be formulated by the requirement of maximizing two (or more) functions
at once [JLJ - it seems like you would need a strategy for dealing with uncertainty and resistance]... One
would be mistaken to believe that it can be obviated... by a mere recourse to the devices of the theory of probability. Every
participant can determine the variables which describe his own actions but not those of the others. Nevertheless those 'alien'
variables cannot, from his point of view, be described by statistical assumptions. This is because the others are guided,
just as he himself, by rational principles - whatever that may mean - and no modus procedendi [JLJ - method of proceeding]
can be correct which does not attempt to understand those principles and the interaction of the conflicting interests of all
participants [Von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944, p.11.]
p.379 An internal model allows a system to look ahead to the future consequences of current actions,
without actually committing itself to those actions... the model enables the agent to make current "stage-setting"
moves that set up later moves that are obviously advantageous. The very essence of a competitive advantage, whether
it be in chess or economics, is the discovery and execution of stage-setting moves. [Holland 1992, p. 25.]
p.394 To make progress in understanding all this, we probably need to begin with simplified (oversimplified?)
models and ignore the critics' tirade that the real world is more complex. The real world is always more complex, which has
the advantage that we shan't run out of work. - John Ball 1984, p. 159
