Again, this is very detached from what ANNs or genetic algorithms are: relatively simple methods to optimise fitness (or "cost") functions.

They are nowhere close to the complexity of a brain, and certainly do not have enough capacity to be a realistic simulation of the universe.

> How do we know until we've tried it? Tried what, is the question? What's an ant-level intelligence? We have algorithms that can detect images/speech at super-human level (at least in some conditions). Worthy questions, but unrelated to these algorithms.

I'm not sure that ants are doing a "realistic simulation of the universe", though, or anything like it. From what I understand, they're a lot closer to little robots than they are to something that can do Kip Thorne-level astrophysics, or Thomas Aquinas-level philosophy.

I am thinking, in particular, of an experiment done by Richard Feynman where he got ants walking across small sheets of glass. After shuffling the sheets around so the chemical trail became a loop, he was able to get the ants tirelessly marching around in a circle (which they would presumably do until they dropped).

Heck, you probably don't even need an ANN at all to do that, much less an evolutionary one.

You could view it that way, but it won't do you much good, since biology is a long ways from physics, and humans didn't spontaneously emerge from a long standing heat bath.

"humans didn't spontaneously emerge from a long standing heat bath."

They didn't? I'm not sure what you're saying here. Are you arguing intelligent design or something? Because the standard evolutionary theories postulate that humans did, in fact, spontaneously arise from a heat bath (the heat coming from the Sun).

If by "spontaneous", you mean a process taking several billion years which included heat from the sun, but also resources on Earth, with billions of previous ancestral forms from simple replicators to complex multicellular organisms, then okay.

That's not what I typically think of when I hear the word "spontaneous". Spontaneous emergence sounds to me like lightning hitting a swamp over a period of time, and then by a pure chance arrangement of molecules, a fully formed swamp man comes out of it.

That's way different than an evolutionary process.

But that's what the discussion is about here:

> Do you think creating a 3D universe (like that being worked on by open.ai), putting the evolvable agents in it and trying to make them evolve learning and intelligence is a good idea

Basically simulating a universe, seeded with some things we think are already somewhere along the road to intelligence, then seeing if progress is made just by simulating for a long time.

Why am I getting downvoted for this? Evolution isn't spontaneous generation. Evolution disproved any notions of spontaneous generation a century or more ago. All life on Earth evolved via a causal process, not random arrangement of atoms.