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phpTaskForce (OP)
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July 07, 2017, 05:54:31 PM |
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Hi,
So I wanted to write something like this for a very long time..
As a kid, I always wondered why am I, I? What is my purpose, is there a beginning of everything, and how big is the Universe.
Then, I forgot all of that, and went to school for a quite some time, and after 16 years of education I still have the same questions unanswered, or wait!
No, school didn't answered my questions, in fact it gave me wrong information on some crucial topics.
I love biology, and one of the biology lessons was dedicated to the Theory of Evolution. We've been show pictures of monkey's, neanderthals, and us humans, you know, that famous picture that ends with person sitting by the computer, but actually it should be only computer standing at the end of the line.
Fast forward, I'm getting BSc degree in computer science, I am about to seek for a job in the industry, and I desperately need some money.
At the time, I'm struggling with social anxiety and depression and I'm put on some SSRI medications. Found the job, not the job I really like,
so in my spare time I try to find interesting things to do, to compensate.
I think SSRI opened my mind in such way, that I was able to see things from a completely different angle than before.
Somehow I discovered Genetic programming, a way to solve complex problems using principles of evolution. How cool is that. I stumbled upon this topic since I could solve one of problems I was working on at the time, with any conventional algorithm. When the program was finished I was skeptic about it, and really didn't believe that it could solve that problem. It actually nailed it every single time. I started to understand evolution and it's real power.
No that I understand evolution, I can answer almost any question I had when I was a little kid watching night sky and dreaming.
Let me explain Evolution to you.
Evolution needs few things to work, it is basically a search optimization method, it can find solutions in a huge search space. In our case it can find living form, organism in millions of possible organisms that fits Earth environment best. But how?
The answer is a lot of time, actually 65 million years of time. But what does Evolution do with all that time. Well it tries different solutions, and pick the best one over and over again. How it generates different solutions? It uses mutations, small accumulated mutations, to slightly change properties of the organism/solution and then checks if the resulting solution fits the environment. That all. Repeat the process of mutation, crossover, and selection millions of times, and you'll find a pretty good solution.
This is what I was thinking of when I was on SSRI. So who are we? We are simply a result of accumulated mutations over millions of years of evolution. And not just we, everything around us evolves as well. There is no specific purpose, the only important thing is how good you fit to the environment in which you are.. And information = DNA = accumulated mutations has been propagated all along.
I'll continue this post...
I'm also open to any philosophical questions you might ask.
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