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asdffyesterday at 11:11 PM2 repliesview on HN

>it's the culmination of research and human engineering.

And how is this different than the process of natural selection? More fit ideas win out relative to less fit and are iterated upon.


Replies

hollowturtleyesterday at 11:31 PM

First of all natural selection doesn't happen per se, nor is controlled by some inherent mechanism, it's the by product of many factors external and internal. So the comparison is just wrong. Human engineering is an interative process not a selection. And if we want to call it selection, even though it is a stretch, we're controlling it, we the master of puppets, natural selection is anything but a controlled process. We don't select a more resistant wing, we engineer the wing with a high bending tolerance, again it's an iterative process

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xg15today at 12:23 AM

By that logic, everything humans do is per definition result of natural selection. Everything is a sphere if you zoom out far enough.

However your starting definition was more limited. it was specifically about "creating candidates at random, then just picking the one that performs best" - and that's definitely not how airplanes are designed.

(It's not even how LLMs work, in fact)