Its prophet was a ruddy-faced, perpetually grinning midwesterner by the name of John Holland. Darwin’s algorithm Like many other early machine-learning researchers, Holland started out working on neural networks, but his interests took a different turn when, while a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he read Ronald Fisher’s classic treatise The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. In it, Fisher, who was also the founder of modern statistics, formulated the first mathematical theory of evolution. Brilliant as it was, Holland felt that Fisher’s theory left out the essence of
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