Sublime

When Donald Trump claimed that he used his own money to finance his primary campaign, he was really declaring, to the chagrin of his party leadership, that he was not to be part of Washington’s massive network of intertwining patron–client relationships.

Darwin’s “strange inversion of reasoning” and Turing’s equally revolutionary inversion were aspects of a single discovery: competence without comprehension. Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless

Nevertheless, deeper reflection on the role of human imagination reveals its fundamental role. Put simply, the earth could not support as many people as it does today if humans had not invented the concept of government from our basic experiences of family life, or the concept of money from our experiences trading small and precious objects. All

Schmidt and Lipson published a paper describing their algorithm, they were deluged with requests for access to the software from other scientists, and they decided to make Eureqa available over the Internet in late 2009. The program has since produced a number of useful results in a range of scientific fields, including a simplified equation

collection of working parts consisting of neurons and their interconnections. If, however, the mind is nothing but a calculating machine, then it is subject to the limitations of the Incompleteness Theorem, which leads to the thorny fact that numbers possess at least some properties that are beyond the power of the human mind to establish: “So this

The take-home message from Schelling’s story—that incentives sometimes backfire—is familiar to psychologists.

Holland had proved what he called the schema theorem, the fundamental theorem of genetic algorithms: in the presence of reproduction, crossover, and mutation, almost any compact cluster of genes that provides above-average fitness will grow in the population exponentially. (“Schema” was his term for any specific pattern of genes.)

Adam

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