Evolutionary synthesis of nand logic: Dissecting a digital organism

Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, Robert J. Marks
2009 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics  
According to conservation of information theorems, performance of an arbitrarily chosen search, on average, does no better than blind search. Domain expertise and prior knowledge about search space structure or target location is therefore essential in crafting the search algorithm. The effectiveness of a given algorithm can be measured by the active information introduced to the search. We illustrate this by identifying sources of active information in Avida, a software program designed to
more » ... ch for logic functions using nand gates. Avida uses stair step active information by rewarding logic functions using a smaller number of nands to construct functions requiring more. Removing stair steps deteriorates Avida's performance while removing deleterious instructions improves it. Some search algorithms use prior knowledge better than others. For the Avida digital organism, a simple evolutionary strategy generates the Avida target in far fewer instructions using only the prior knowledge available to Avida. Index Terms-conservation of information, active information, assisted search, evolutionary search, endogenous information, importance sampling, sea of gates, nand logic, no free lunch theorems.
doi:10.1109/icsmc.2009.5345941 dblp:conf/smc/EwertDM09 fatcat:gfv6uzlhbzdrhdjx4vefkae2ie