Biological evolution takes time, and lots of it. Even artificial selective breeding programs generally take a lot of time for relatively small gains.

Only because the time between generations could be lengthy. A selective breeding of insects could go relatively quickly, since each generation will only take a few months, weeks, or even days.

Some of the genetic algorithms (a super search for that should bring some interesting nodes) could take a few milliseconds to go through a single generation. So in this case, the breeding program could take no more than a few minutes of CPU time.

I do agree, though, that this "evolutionary" design isn't necessarily going to produce the best designs. In the example of genetic algorithms, it could have been that a combination which would have produced a great solution in a few more generations, but was reaped away because it didn't solve the problem very well right now. Not only that, but since this is all happening so fast that its difficult to analyze each generation by a human, it is likely the programmer will never see the potential that solution had. If anything like natural selection can be applied to software design, it must be a conscious effort on the part of the programmer.

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

: () { :|:& };:

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

In reply to Re: (OT) Evolutionary Design?? by hardburn
in thread (OT) Evolutionary Design?? by Anonymous Monk

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