Posted by Jeremy on August 01, 2003 at 10:58:37:
In Reply to: what's the point? posted by dave on July 31, 2003 at 17:48:18:
You are truly missing the point. Natural selection and resulting evolution can occur on different levels. While we think of poems being created within one person's mind over one life, with vocabulary that is learned, in fact these can be thrown into an evolutionary system like the one here and so "evolve" when natural selection is applied to them.
The poem system here is akin to, say, the feather coloration of birds being selected by their environment: the "environment" can be predators, the social milieu of attracting mates, need for camouflage, etc. Traits that help the organism survive will be bred into the next generations because survivors get to breed. The same setup is being used here but it's poems, not birds, that are evolving. And the "environment" the poems are subjected to is peoples' likes and dislikes, subtle meanings of words that people find attractive, and other characteristics like poem length that are either selected for or against. We humans are simply choosing; the evolutionary system is producing the new products.
This is not "fluff" but an interesting exercise of designing an evolutionary system. We're already seeing how mutations are creating desirable traits, observing clustering of traits, and the need to build into the next version features that nature is known to use, like genes that control other genes, the desirability of mutations within words, and the like.
I have heard about computer simulations of the immune system and these, too, have developed to work amazingly like the real immune system in clever ways that could not be anticipated by "rational" design. It was shown that previously little-understood elements of the immune system were seen to be critical to its overall functioning.
There is more to be learned about genetics. This project is very illuminating because it lets one see the utility of various evolutionary and genetic phenomena. What better way to learn how a machine is put together than to build one?
It also drives home the point that a seemingly "intelligent" system can occur quite amazingly once certain simple "dumb" mechanisms are in place.
: Your experiment sounds like a great project for a freshman statistics or mathematical logic course, but essentially you are repeating the old "monkeys in a room writing Shakespeare" question. What are you trying to prove? Since the words were initially computer-generated this has nothing to do with natural selection. You need to start with poems written by humans that will be subsequently edited by the readers of your website.
: Random words are just that, but finished poems arise from a vocabulary that has been developed over the span of a poet's life. These words are then selected, filtered and arranged by the hearts and minds of the authors to relay some type of message. Computers can suggest words and spell-check, but only humans can do the real editing.
: Rather than waste your time on this fluff, why not take a real poet out for dinner or drinks?