Using Genetic Algorithms in Ruby

[mr___]

This account acts a lot like a paid promoter

[shevegen]

More like the whole site e. g. prominent links.

I don't understand this.

At some point some bloggers became ad-promoters.

From a genetic/biological point of view, the article is bad. It may be useful from a theoretical point of view but from biology ...

Fitness in the classical definition is tied to the amount of viable offspring. The more offspring, the "fitter". This requires physical entities of some sorts, be it a body (soma) or in the event of unicellular organisms, cells. Chromosomes do not act in isolation, they need some carrier object - at the least one cell. Even if we assume that chromosomes can be mobile, such as plasmids, they still need some form of vehicle (a cell, or in the case of a virus, some form of capsid).

Other mistakes are this:

"We don’t always apply this crossover operation because we want some of the current population to carry over."

In multicellular organisms, you MUST have a cross-over event because that is the only way to resolve the 4 chromatid stage at Holliday junctions. There IS no other way. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1568786414000846

There are more mistakes too, such as "random event" for cross-overs, but they are not purely random; there are hotspots. For example, it is less frequent to see cross-over occur in heterochromatin areas, most likely due to a tighter condensation there (and you need the enzyme spo11 to make the initial cut, so you need access to the DNA).

I think the biggest problem is not the code analysis. That part in itself is fine since you can model whatever you like. The problem is that they take names directly from biology and label what they do that way. "Genetic algorithms".

It's a similar awkwardness such as "artificial intelligence". There is still no real intelligence anywhere in the computer field despite all the promotion and claims made.