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Re:Lessons learned from wikipedia's fundraising banner design by alexdong on Monday November 15, 2010 @09:02PM (#1908758)
One more interesting coverage about this design is on quora: http://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/Is-having-Jimmy-Wales-picture... The one with Jimmy on it has 10 times more "conversion" than others. Impressive!

I also like how the fundraising committee involves the community to design the banners. It feels like a genetic algorithm trained/evolved based on human clicks.

Re:Lessons learned from wikipedia's fundraising banner design by patio11 on Monday November 15, 2010 @11:16PM (#1909010)
Any sufficiently advanced A/B testing setup is indistinguishable from Strong AI -- it just has people embedded in the loop.
Re:Lessons learned from wikipedia's fundraising banner design by ntoshev on Tuesday November 16, 2010 @12:24AM (#1909165)
Strong AI is overrated: evolution beats intelligent design every time.
Re:Lessons learned from wikipedia's fundraising banner design by apl on Tuesday November 16, 2010 @04:19AM (#1909584)
It doesn't.

[EDIT: There isn't much more to say. The claim that (esp. natural) evolutionary processes strive for streamlined and optimal solutions is simply false, for various (even a priori) reasons.]

Re:Lessons learned from wikipedia's fundraising banner design by ntoshev on Tuesday November 16, 2010 @09:13AM (#1910088)
You should point out a counterexample. I guess it would reveal that your definition of optimality is different from "evolutionary fitness", and it shouldn't be.

Note I didn't claim that "evolutionary processes strive for streamlined and optimal solutions". I have no idea how you derived that or why are all these people voting you up and me down (I'd appreciate an explanation btw). I just made a joke that I think contains a kernel of non-trivial truth, although I don't believe it's true if you take it literally as a claim for a universal fact.

Edit: Perhaps I figured out part of the voting - people think I disagree with a popular HNer in an irrelevant way. Amusing.

Re:Lessons learned from wikipedia's fundraising banner design by LaPingvino on Tuesday November 16, 2010 @11:53AM (#1910675)
Just for one thing: evolution is not going to help YOU in this life. Intelligently designed software does.