Ask HN: Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=633973

by amichail • 17 years ago

9 22 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Isn't it sort of like finding the task of understanding and debugging code written by very poor programmers to be rewarding?

markerdmann2• 17 years ago

If you're looking at all of the code that evolution has ever written, then yes, I suppose you could say that most of it is very poor. The fraction of code that survives and propagates, however, is awe-inspiringly beautiful.

If you're looking for some insight into what makes it so beautiful, The Selfish Gene is an excellent place to start.

amichail6• 17 years ago

What evidence do you have that the code that survives and propagates is elegant (i.e., at the DNA sequence level)?

In genetic programming, the products of evolution on a computer are completely incomprehensible.

What makes natural evolution any different?

markerdmann2• 17 years ago

If someone who is not a programmer looks at your code and pronounces it utterly incomprehensible, does that make it inelegant?

What exactly would "evidence" of something as subjective as "elegance" look like?

amichail6• 17 years ago

BTW, code growth seems important in some cases for evolution on a computer: http://www2.cs.uidaho.edu/~tsoule/cs472fall05/AlifePeaks2.pd...

russell• 17 years ago

Good grief! Take your favorite OSS project, or even Windows. What do you think it would look like after 4 billion years of cut and paste.

amichail6• 17 years ago

Evolution is not directed by an intelligence. And moreover there is evidence that useless code in an evolutionary process can sometimes give you better results by protecting functional code against harmful mutations/crossovers.

schorndorfer• 17 years ago

Just a guess, bu biology research is probably rewarding to some at least in part because there are so many important consequences to our lives for understanding how it works. Curing disease seems pretty rewarding, doesn't it?

amichail6• 17 years ago

I wouldn't find it rewarding. As I said, it's like trying to understand and debug code written by very poor programmers.

I would rather use genetic algorithms for my own purposes rather than trying to understand the messy artifacts of nature.

But yes, the fear of death will give such research a lot of funding.

paulgb• 17 years ago

Evolution may write poor code, but it can accomplish some really cool stuff with it. The human brain, for example. If a programmer had managed to recreate the human brain in code, even if he did it in spaghetti-coded COBOL, people would want to have a look.

Also, evolution isn't always elegant, but it often is. Think of the symmetry and self-similarity found so often in nature.

amichail6• 17 years ago

The very poor code I'm referring to is in the genotype (i.e., the DNA sequence). You can get an elegant phenotype (i.e., the resulting creature) from a very messy genotype.

bored• 17 years ago

If you see things that way, then yes, DNA code is not very elegant or parsimonious. There are plenty of sequences that don't do anything (as far as we know).

adamcrowe• 17 years ago

"If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Bert Hubert - DNA seen through the eyes of a coder http://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/index.html

philh• 17 years ago

I think it's probably more like trying to understand machine code written by very short-sighted programmer, on an arcitecture that you're unfamiliar with, for which no documentation exists, and which you don't have access to for testing purposes.

I think that's an interesting problem, regardless of the quality of the code.

10ren2• 17 years ago

Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding?

Because biologists aren't looking at the code, but the product.

For example, I really liked NN 4.7. It was responsive and consistent. But the codebase was so poor, that they rewrote it - and nuked themselves. Joel on Software wrote an essay about how as a codebase evolves to cope with more and more special cases, it gets more complex and ugly. But that's because it needs to be (according to Joel).

In other words, no one cares about your code. They care about what it does. If it does something really cool and amazing, people will want to know how you did it. What it "does" can go beyond performance and features - what code does can include realizing a new user-interaction approach, or a new algorithm, or a new way to model something. Imagine the jury-rigged prototype of the first telephone, light-bulb, aeroplane - the slickness of the implementation just doesn't matter. The invention matters.

If, one day, we work out how DNA codes for a brain, we may be able to code it better. But what we lack is any idea of how to do it at all. Poor code that works is infinitely better and more cool than no idea.

This is why biologists might be interested in the poor code: How the hell did he do that?

amichail6• 17 years ago

I doubt biologists will find anything particularly insightful about how the brain thinks in my lifetime.

In fact, it may be that it is impossible to determine how the brain thinks from our physical reality.

10ren2• 17 years ago

You're saying that the brain's operation may be supernatural.

saurabh• 17 years ago

I think evolution writes "good enough" code, if I can put it that way.

Confusion• 17 years ago

Evolution writes excellent code, because it is understood perfectly by its intended audience.

papaf• 17 years ago

I don't think the code metaphore is a good one. Its more like reverse engineering self duplicating and self healing nanotech hardware i.e. hardware so complex it can't be artificially designed with current understanding.

The situation is made more complex by the fact that this hardware is interacting with different types of other hardware such as viruses and bacteria.

aswanson• 17 years ago

Because we have diseases to cure, lives that we want to enhance and curiosities to satisfy.

Insofar as the code metaphor goes, I don't think you can comment on the quality unless you completely understand what it is doing and how robust it is. For example, the code that architected your neocortex is significantly smaller than the source for Open Office. I find that impressive.

Until you are capable of producing something better, you can't make those statements.

wglb• 17 years ago

Wait--who says it is poor code, and by what criteria? And what we think of as parsimonious as a quality is not a useful metric for DNA.

jaskew• 17 years ago

Evolution does not write code.

'Code' created by a long series of chaotic events manages to survive or not survive.

The research is rewarding because it is challenging. Both the discover of the raw data and the interpretation of said data is dumbfoundingly complex, to the point where any tiny amount of comprehension is the result of more work than you can possibly imagine.

In short, it's hard, and success is uncommon and amazing.

Ask HN: Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding?

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