Pavel Bažant <pbaz...@gmail.com> writes: > I am developing an evolutionary simulation called Evoversum. An interesting > thing I noticed on multiple occasions while developing the program was the > fact that it tends to "debug itself". The simulated organisms, as a > consequence of the Darwinian evolution taking place, are very quick to > trigger all sorts of bugs, sometimes to their advantage, sometimes > triggering undefined behavior, destroying their own world. So it seems > likely that this effect is applicable in other software domains, too.
Reminds me of a video I saw on YouTube (can't find it at the moment) where a genetic algorithm evolved creatures (collections of sticks, joints and motors) in a physics simulation. The goal was to move the furthest distance, in the hope that they'd walk/crawl/etc. In fact, one of them triggers a bug in the simulation which causes it to explode, sending its body parts flying in all directions. This immediately dominates the population, so all the creatures start exploding. I suppose the morals are: 1) Evolutionary methods are good at finding bugs 2) Your fitness function is not selecting for what you think it is ;) Cheers, Chris _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
