The key to a genetic algorithm is that the human designers don’t directly program a solution; rather, we let one emerge through an iterative process of simulated competition and improvement. Biological evolution is smart but slow, so to enhance its intelligence we greatly speed up its ponderous pace. The computer is fast enough to simulate many generations in a matter of hours or days, and we’ve occasionally had them run for as long as weeks to simulate hundreds of thousands of generations. But we have to go through this iterative process only once; as soon as we have let this simulated
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