It makes sense to explore outside the box if your problem can't be found in a very limited search space. However the statement > Many natural processes don’t appear to be objective based. Natural evolution and human innovation are cases in point. Is not correct. Evolution is highly objective based and micro-incremental.
This sounds like anthropomorphizing (or at least teleologizing) evolution. "Evolution" is just the name we give to the observation that some random adaptations confer survival advantages and thus are seen more frequently in later generations. At no point is there any intention, direction, or goal.
The video referenced by the article is actually very intriguing and well done. It's basically just talking about the incredible power of broadly pursuing novelty and interestingness, as opposed to a specific goal.
AIUI, it's about having an objective function which measures something other than the delta to a pre-defined goal, but rather a higher-level more abstract function. Another phrase for it would be "unknown unknowns": if your success criteria are too focused, you'll miss out on solutions that you couldn't conceive of before they're discovered. The "Objective" criticised in this article is like a "known unknown".
More than that, even when they discovered an interesting result, they couldn't go back and create an objective based algorithm that could return to that result... even though it was known to be possible. (I mean, they obviously knew the specific steps taken, but they couldn't create an algorithm that could re-find them with a specific result in mind.)
One of the father's of quality, W. Edwards Deming came out very strong against Management by Objective, even though he was very statistically inclined. In his 14 points [0] he mentions Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management. . His idea is you should focus on the journey (always improve) rather than artificial endpoints. It's a profound idea, and one I've sometimes struggled to…
The article is terrible - it is effectively saying "being objective" is not good for achieving that "objective". This is complete non-sense without untangling the epistemic roots for said words, the author may have had. It's apparent that it's actually saying that being too "greedy" (i.e too low a horizon) can be bad for achieving an objective. This is well known to both Control theorists, RL practitioners, and many…
It would be interesting to see if you could improve on the results supposedly disproving having an 'objective'. I haven't sat through the full 40 minutes of the video and I don't see any writeups on the Picbreeder website (which appears to have not had any news updates since 2011), so I am guessing that what he did was using a CNN image classifier and do greedy maximization over the various options on each step; it will surprise no one in RL that this does not work as it is not a convex problem. But a RL CNN trained to instead predict human choices (imitation learning) or do RL learning with rewards just from the final step (perhaps Christiano's preference learning setup?) might do much better.
After all, all the comments about the folly of greed apply just as well to choosing moves in Go, but you don't need to abandon 'the myth of winning' to win Go. It's simply about having an excellent heuristic for promising directions and keeping options open.
It would be interesting to test this on academicians: take objectives off of them (grants, large number of publications; hell, even tenure!) and let them wander freely through their field of research. I have the impression this was normality decades ago.
The article is terrible - it is effectively saying "being objective" is not good for achieving that "objective". This is complete non-sense without untangling the epistemic roots for said words, the author may have had. It's apparent that it's actually saying that being too "greedy" (i.e too low a horizon) can be bad for achieving an objective. This is well known to both Control theorists, RL practitioners, and many…
It would be interesting to see if you could improve on the results supposedly disproving having an 'objective'. I haven't sat through the full 40 minutes of the video and I don't see any writeups on the Picbreeder website (which appears to have not had any news updates since 2011), so I am guessing that what he did was using a CNN image classifier and do greedy maximization over the various options on each step; it w…
I my case, my greatest flaw in playing GO was losing sight of the objective - i.e. gaining more space everywhere. Instead I would zoom in too tightly on wherever the last few moves had happened; win battles and lose the war. I suspect that's very common in newbie GO players. But I still like the article, creativity is a different task with different pitfalls.
Have you read or watched what the picbreeder author is actually about? It's not about a greater horizon. It's that you only get "valuable results" by using a heuristic that only looks at the very next steps, and completely ignoring any goals that would lie further ahead. You could say that he's promoting a greedy search with very broad success parameters. An example: You plan to be a millionaire, and you currently ha…
I find an interesting parallel with hill-climbing and local optima. In your example, the reason everyone isn't a millionaire is mostly to do with the fact that that's a very noisy problem space, there are far far too many random variables at play, not to mention there's a finite supply of money, it's literally impossible for everyone to be a millionaire (well, you could inflate the currency to the point where a milli…
> not to mention there's a finite supply of money, it's literally impossible for everyone to be a millionaire (well, you could inflate the currency to the point where a million dollars is nearly worthless, but that's just playing semantic games).
Most people who are millionaires don't get there by holding a million dollars in currency, they get there by holding assets worth a million dollars. This is not zero sum - assets can be created (and destroyed), and their value is assigned only at the time of transaction. The total value of all assets in the U.S. is significantly larger (by orders of magnitude) than the total amount of U.S. dollars available.
I find an interesting parallel with hill-climbing and local optima. In your example, the reason everyone isn't a millionaire is mostly to do with the fact that that's a very noisy problem space, there are far far too many random variables at play, not to mention there's a finite supply of money, it's literally impossible for everyone to be a millionaire (well, you could inflate the currency to the point where a milli…
> not to mention there's a finite supply of money, it's literally impossible for everyone to be a millionaire (well, you could inflate the currency to the point where a million dollars is nearly worthless, but that's just playing semantic games). Most people who are millionaires don't get there by holding a million dollars in currency, they get there by holding assets worth a million dollars. This is not zero sum - a…
It isn't a question of actual dollars in circulation, you can always print more after all, it's a question of total economic value. All goods in circulation in the U.S. have a finite value, and it definitely is a zero sum game. You can add more goods and therefore value, but that can only happen at a certain rate (this would be tied into population growth, employment rate, and profit margins among other things). There are also close ties with median income as the value of goods tends to be tied directly to wealth distribution. Ultimately at any given time there is a finite amount of "wealth" to go around, if one person gets a bigger slice, then that means someone else has to take a smaller slice. People don't want to be millionaires because they have some unhealthy attraction to U.S. currency, they want to be millionaires because of the goods and services that they can trade that money for (or in many cases because they can use it for rent seeking to generate unearned income). The actual amount of currency in question is irrelevant, it's a question of access to those goods and services, and those goods and services are finite, therefore wealth is finite.
I appreciate the work and research that went into this. However, I can't help but feel as if some of these statements aren't very concretely true, or untrue. For example, ok, if I get tunnel vision and just focus on one objective, I might lose sight of other paths. I can see what you mean, but let's put that into practice. "If you focus on profit, you might lose focus on innovation." Ok, but if I focus solely on inno…
Think about Zuckerburg's wealth. If he had sat in his dorm with the goal of building a multi-billion dollar empire, do you think he would have started with "thefacebook"?
There's a considerable amount of luck in Zuck's story.
Peter Thiel gave him money and he demolished Myspace somehow.