Blind Watchmaker
"There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other,
an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which
we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and
designed its use."
— William Paley, Natural Theology (1802)
"Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which
Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the
existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in
mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future.
It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to
play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker."
— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986)
A blind watchmaker program is an interactive evolution process through which one can grasp the essential component of (natural) selection: Cumulative mutations. By blindly selecting, based on your current preferences, which individuals reproduce you generate evolutionary trajectories that may end with very complex individuals. And this does not require you to understand how they work, only to judge if they are "fit".
| Generation 0 | ||
| Presets for different type of evolutionary dynamics | ||
| Restart from generation 0 with random splinoids | ||
| Initial range for the genome values. Small values mean less initial complexity. | ||
| Number of splines per side | ||
| Number of individuals per dimension | ||
| Number of individuals used in generating the next population | ||
| Number of elementary mutations between generations | ||
| Amplitude (standard deviation around zero) of each elementary mutation | ||