Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

So Much For Random Searches

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There’s an article in Discover Magazine about how gamers have been able to solve a problem in HIV research in only three weeks (!) that had remained outside of researcher’s powerful computer tools for years.

This, until now, unsolvable problem gets solved because:

They used a wide range of strategies, they could pick the best places to begin, and they were better at long-term planning. Human intuition trumped mechanical number-crunching.

Oh,my! Teleology raises its ugly head!

But, now, let’s hear it for Intelligent Design. Here’s what intelligent agents were able to do within the search space of possible solutions:

. . . until now, scientists have only been able to discern the structure of the two halves together. They have spent more than ten years trying to solve structure of a single isolated half, without any success.

The Foldit players had no such problems. They came up with several answers, one of which was almost close to perfect. In a few days, Khatib had refined their solution to deduce the protein’s final structure, and he has already spotted features that could make attractive targets for new drugs.

Random search: 10 years + and No Success
Intelligent Agents: 3 weeks and Success.

Is there a lesson to be learned here Darwinist onlookers?

Comments
Elizabeth, this is how the solving took place:
The controls are intuitive; tutorial levels introduce the game’s mechanics; colourful visuals provide hints; and the interface is explained in simple language. While protein scientists concern themselves with “rotating alpha-helices” and “fixing degrees of freedom”, Foldit players simply ‘tweak’, ‘freeze’, ‘wiggle’ and ‘shake’ their on-screen shapes.
Human intelligence pervades the whole process. This wasn't some computer program number-crunching itself through some kind of search alogrithm. Human INTUITION was what solved the problem. You know, "intelligence". And, of course, intuition is that part of our intelligence that leaps immediately towards some final end. So, it's teleology.PaV
September 19, 2011
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PaV, read the article: "But until now, scientists have only been able to discern the structure of the two halves together. They have spent more than ten years trying to solve structure of a single isolated half, without any success." Do you really believe those trained molecular biologists were randomly choosing structures and then seeing if they worked? They've been using all of their knowledge and expertise (in other words, "...knowledge of what the final goal should look like: i.e., TELEOLOGY!!") for the last ten years without success. Then the problem was recast so amateurs with good general intelligence and little or no molecular biology knowledge could work on the problem as a game and swarms of those amateurs solved most of the problem in three weeks. At that point an expert stepped in and finalized the solution. Or, in short, distributed intelligence beat isolated intelligences. F/N The owner of the house we're renting this week just came in wearing a Baylor sweatshirt. I brought up Dembski and ID. NOT a fan of either! In spades!dmullenix
September 19, 2011
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It is claimed that randomness is an essential part of evolution. Coupled with natural selection it is claimed to have produced all variety of life we observe. The problem with this explanation is that it is highly implausible on the grand scale. While it certainly explains "the small world" variability (roughly within existing species) which is observable, it cannot realistically explain giant leaps of structural complexity between taxa. These giant leaps correspond to substantial increases of information that cannot be reliably accounted for other than by intelligent agency.Eugene S
September 19, 2011
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No, we're trying to equate intelligent design with evolution.PaV
September 19, 2011
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Elizabeth, you're missing the forest for the trees. Here's what the guy who made this success possible said:
“These results indi­cate the potential for integrating video games into the real-world scientific process: the ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.”
The success didn't depend on "a distributed competitive system with proximal rewards". You're being almost willfully blind here. I don't know why. (But I have my opinion, ;) )PaV
September 19, 2011
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More than just opinion, it's a hypothesis be worked into a theory - meaning it's going to require more intellectual effort to dispute the possibility of natural evolution:
Life as Evolving Software* Gregory Chaitin, September 7, 2011 In the fi rst paper in this series we proposed modeling biological evolution by studying the evolution of randomly mutating software we call this metabiology. In particular, we proposed considering a single mutating software organism following a random walk in software space of increasing fitness ... And we measured the rate of evolutionary progress using the Busy Beaver function BB(N) = the largest integer that can be named by an N-bit program. Our two results employing the framework are * with random mutations, random point mutations, we will get to fitness BB(N) in time exponential in N (evolution by exhaustive search), * whereas by choosing the mutations by hand and applying them in the right order, we will get to tness BB(N) in time linear in N (evolution by intelligent design). We were unable to show that cumulative evolution will occur at random; exhaustive search starts from scratch each time. This paper advances beyond the previous work on metabiology by proposing a better concept of mutation ... Using this new notion of mutation, these much more powerful mutations, enables us to accomplish the following: * We are now able to show that random evolution will become cumulative and will reach fitness BB(N) in time that grows roughly as N2, so that random evolution behaves much more like intelligent design than it does like exhaustive search. * We also have a version of our model in which we can show that hierarchical structure will evolve, a conspicuous feature of biological organisms that previously was beyond our reach.
rhampton7
September 19, 2011
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[satire warning] Which raises an interesting possibility: Shifting some government funding from scientists to gamers to get more bang for the research buck. If they can do this for points, think what they might accomplish for real coin of the realm. Or maybe even a Nobel prize? Not to mention that learned capabilities are a major factor in virtually all forms of design, as opposed to natural processes that determine things such as the winding course of a river from the mountains to the sea.RalphDavidWestfall
September 19, 2011
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Surely we are not trying to equate randomness with evolution are we?thud
September 19, 2011
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Well, read the rest of the article :) It describes a distributed competitive system! And what happened was that the scientists, who did have some knowledge of what the final goal should look like did worse than the gamers, who were solving bits of it, for points.Elizabeth Liddle
September 19, 2011
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Yes, it's opinion, but I've presented the argument quite often. It's not original though! Basically, it's the argument that the brain works by a system that is sometimes called "neural Darwinism", with excitatory connections taking the role of positive selection and inhibitory connections the role of negative selection. Maybe we can talk about it on another thread! Or on my blog - I've been thinking of writing a piece about it. I'll send you the link :)Elizabeth Liddle
September 19, 2011
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Are you blind to reality? Here's the quote:
. . . they could pick the best places to begin, and they were better at long-term planning. Human intuition trumped mechanical number-crunching.
How can you simply turn a blind's eye to this: "THEY COULD PICK THE BEST PLACES TO BEGIN . . ."! What in the world does this have to do with a "distributed competitive system with proximal rewards"? This is human intelligence at work using knowledge of what the final goal should look like: i.e., TELEOLOGY!!PaV
September 19, 2011
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Elizabeth: This is pure opinion. How in the world is what you say true. Please present some sort of an argument.PaV
September 19, 2011
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Actually, it's a really interesting piece, thanks! But I think it makes a better pro evo argument than a pro-design argument! It shows that a distributed competitive system with proximal rewards works better than a top-down expert system with long-term goals!Elizabeth Liddle
September 19, 2011
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Oddly enough, chemistry solves the problem in milliseconds without computation. So the actual scorecard should read: Intelligent searches, ten years and no score Gamers score in three weeks Natural processes score thousands of times per minute.Petrushka
September 19, 2011
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But evolutionary processes aren't "random search"! In fact evolutionary processes are much closer to "intelligent design"!Elizabeth Liddle
September 19, 2011
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Random searches for potential drugs have been going on for a while. There was a short article a couple of years ago about the significant expenses in time and machines in this area, and the nearly complete lack of success of the effort.Eric Anderson
September 19, 2011
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