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Comment by puttycat | Hacker News Reader

That's also the beauty of evolution–there's no goal in that search algorithm, just open-ended incremental exploration which eventually grows beautiful things.

See Kenneth Stanley's book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25670869-why-greatness-c...

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> That's also the beauty of evolution–there's no goal in that search algorithm,

Yes there is, there's a fitness function, both in biological evolution and evolutionary algorithms

That is not a goal. It is an adaptive strategy to meet changing constraints.

I’d argue it isn’t a strategy either. You can’t not be subject to it.

There’s no goal in biological evolution. Being subject to natural selection based on the present environment is an inevitability.

You could argue that mutation isn’t inevitable, but its presence and degree is subject to natural selection as well.

This is the second time someone has recommended this book on HN so for sure it can't be a bad read. I will be starting it tonight

The book may be a good read or bad one, I am unfamiliar with it. However, terrible recommendations are made on HN all the time, as well good ones, so I’d caution against “recommended a few times on HN” (on its own!) as an indicator of much anything.

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EDIT: changed wording from “multiple times” to “a few times” to be more clear.

It may be an indicator of popularity / mindshare of certain ideas. It says little about the ideas' substance, but may still be very important in practice, if you deal with people.

The git cli tool is mentioned countless times over many years on HN, surely an indicator that it’s in popular use by the commentatorship here.

I’ve seen many (seemingly informed) mentions of the jj cli tool in the last year — not unreasonable to conclude interest in it is growing among folks here, and enough to pique my curiosity.

I responded to:

   This is the second time [I’ve seen that] someone has recommended this book on HN

From Ken Stanley's wiki

>He left both Uber AI Labs and the University of Central Florida in 2020 to lead the Open-Endedness team at OpenAI as a Research Science Manager.

I've always found that an "evolutionary" approach to design is important[0].

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/evolutionary-design-specificati...

Incorrect. The search algo has a goal: to find out. You just think it has no goal because you didnt think in quantum.

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