If you said this in any other context, it would sound laughably ludicrous. Imagine billions of lines of code for an incredibly advanced, complex and self-replicating system appearing out of the thin air (over 2 bil. yrs) by mere chance. Even with the long time period, it sounds facetious, prima facie. For some reason people decide to switch off their common sense and rationality when it comes to this.
Frankly I'm surprised to see that kind of sentiment coming out of such a CS-heavy audience, since genetic algorithms demonstrably work, and function on the same mathematical principles minus the biological substrate.
And haven't biologists, in recent years, emphasized the degree to which evolution relies on mutations and genetic drift? That was my understanding of the way the field has been going, anyway.
Saying that evolution as a whole is just "random chance" seems reductionist, but randomness does appear to be involved.
The problem arises because when biologists, statisticians etc say "random process," they mean something very specific that can actually contain many different kinds of mathematical structure, but your average layman hears that term to mean "¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
But if you start throwing the dice and you keep all the sixes you get along the way, Yahtzee-style, we expect you'll have 20 sixes in about 25-30 throws.
In the latter case, external selection has turned an incredibly implausible result into a certainty.
To put it in terms of genetic algorithms, we could run through N generations M different times and get different results each time.
To me that makes it seem like saying "randomness is an important aspect of evolution" isn't so far from the mark.
Again, randomness is an important part of evolution, but there are also necessary deterministic aspects of it that make the "blind watchmaker" type arguments that started this discussion irrelevant.
Complexity argument is not valid. It's debatable at least. AFAIK it's part of the bigger discussion whether evolution has direction.
But this scenario has the implicit assumption of a deterministic outcome (all 6s), and also that after each throw, the outcome of chance is being analyzed according to a set of rules, which are being applied such that keeping/discarding dice is done to produce a deterministic outcome.
Even if you deny that there is traditional "intelligence" in the process such as a dice thrower, the scenario still fails to answer why there is even a set of rules for evaluating these independent dice throws in the first place, where these rules came from, and why those rules seemingly guide events of completely random chance in a pre-determined direction at all (all 6s).
"Evolution works like a Yahtzee dice game minus all the Yahtzee rules"... How does that make sense?
"Chess works like checkers except you remove all the checkers rules and just play chess"
1) the process is iterative, not a single "roll" that has to turn out right
2) each generation is a modification of the previous one, not a completely new "roll"
3) some states more likely to progress to the next generation than others
We occur in an environment where these conditions are satisfied. Why that is the case is a question well beyond the scope of evolutionary theory.