In his book River Out Of Eden (Basic Books), Richard Dawkins uses the analogy of a flowing river to describe evolution. Evolution, he explains, can create the eye. In fact, it can create dozens of versions of it, for wasps, octopods, humans, eagles, and whales. What it can’t do well is go backward: once you have an eye that’s useful, slight mutations don’t usually yield improvements. A human won’t evolve an eagle’s eye, because the intermediate steps all result in bad eyesight. Machine-only optimization suffers from similar limitations as evolution. If you’re optimizing for local maxima, you
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This is a very strong analogy.
