Salon.com Technology | When machines breed

When machines breed:

I remember going to see Manuel de Landa, author of 10,000 Years of Non-linear History, speak briefly about genetic algorithms at Buffalo a few years back. It’s funny; even as someone who categorically believes ‘Artificial Intelligence’ to be a paradox (if my works don’t tell you, I believe intelligence to be, largely, an embodied phenomenon), I am whole-heartedly behind this kind of evolutionary experimentation. Altho I doubt I (or George Lakoff) will be proved wrong, I’ve been known to eat my words before. In the meanwhile, programming computers to play out trial and error at a rate exponentially faster than humans could, and tossing apples into any batch of oranges now and again, could undoubtedly make for some efficient, and likely strange, technology. From the linked article, “It has proved difficult to clarify exactly how these circuits work.” Talk about a black box.