RE: virus: Level Three-Belief and Utility.

zaimoni@ksu.edu
Fri, 1 Nov 1996 08:35:23 -0600 (CST)


On Thu, 31 Oct 1996, Richard Brodie wrote:

> David Leeper wrote:
>
> >Replicators, including memes, have an unsupased ability to
> >not get caught in a "valley or a hillock".
>
> That statement is in direct opposition to what scientists are saying
> about replicators. Dawkins, Dennett, and even Gould agree that getting
> caught at local maxima is an inherent quality of evolution by natural
> selection. That is why, for instance, our eyes have nerves coming out
> the front instead of the back.

This is also mathematically derivable, from natural selection as applied
Differential Equations. The problem's a result of the math, not the physics.

This is why optimizing code usually doesn't give dramatic improvement in
the Big Oh rating--correct optimization is a local procedure, and cannot
completely rewrite algorithms drastically enough to alter that statistic.

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/ Towards the conversion of data into information....
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/ Kenneth Boyd
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