Darwin machine

A Darwin machine (a 1987 coinage by William H. Calvin, by analogy to a Turing machine) is a machine that, like a Turing machine, involves an iteration process that yields a high-quality result, but, whereas a Turing machine uses logic, the Darwin machine uses rounds of variation, selection, and inheritance.

In its original connotation, a Darwin machine is any process that bootstraps quality by utilizing all of the six essential features of a Darwinian process: A pattern is copied with variations, where populations of one variant pattern compete with another population, their relative success biased by a multifaceted environment (natural selection) so that winners predominate in producing the further variants of the next generation (Darwin's inheritance principle).

More loosely, a Darwin machine is a process that utilizes some subset of the Darwinian essentials, typically natural selection to create a non-reproducing pattern, as in neural Darwinism. Many aspects of neural development utilize overgrowth followed by pruning to a pattern, but the resulting pattern does not itself create further copies.

Darwin machine has been used multiple times to name computer programs after Charles Darwin.

See also

References and external links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 6/27/2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.