Abhijeet Mulgund's Personal Webpage

Search

Search IconIcon to open search

Evolution and its relationship with Agents

Last updated Nov 1, 2022

We think of a Genetic Algorithm as evolving an Organism, but it is really evolving particular Genes. The Organism, or abstractly the Agent, is simply the carrier for those genes. The Agent has no particular Cost Function attached to them.

If we think about the RNA World Hypothesis, little packets of RNA were able to replicate themselves (perhaps in some kind of lipid bilayer). The Agent (in this case the lipid package containing the RNA), was in the literal sense a carrier for the Gene. As time went on, presumeably, improved carriers were selected for such as

We were evolved as carriers for our genes, and given “free will” as a mutation that was selected to better propogate our genome.

So what gives us the ability to “make choices” but not cellular organism or computers? When I talked with Gyorgy Turan, he suggested the idea of Inverse Reinforcement Learning, where the Agent “learns” a Reward Function or some form of tradeoff management. Perhaps we can break down some of the components of what we percieve as intelligence as