Posted by David on November 14, 2003 at 09:48:53:
In Reply to: There needs to be new input!!! posted by Sam on November 12, 2003 at 04:30:05:
Hmmm.
There's a famous anecdote from the advertising world in which the client, a CEO, after sitting through yet another meeting looking at ads, said, "I think the public is tired of this campaign. We need a fresh angle." To which the ad executive said, "Well, um, we haven't actually run any ads from this campaign yet; they're still in production."
The point being that too much familiarity can dull one's senses.
I agree that in some ways its not as much fun reading the current crop of poems because so many of the phrases are ones we've seen repeatedly. But if evolution is, in fact, happening, we would expect to see an increasingly homogenous population with more subtle, less-dramatic variation.
Furthermore, if the population really does stagnate (as it did in Version 1) then the only justifiable option would be to trash it and start over, with a larger initial population and/or a more sophisticated genetic model. Anything else would be "cheating" in terms of making the evolutionary approach work.
I would argue that rather than new input, we need new inputters. (Basically Phil's point.)
--David
: Time to throw in some new ingredients.
: The poems are becoming stale. Reaching that asymptotic line of 'the end', you know, end of growth curve, way too far into the field of diminishing returns...
: But thats just my opinion as a devoted voter, I guess.