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because these genetic algorithms are best suited for consistent behaviour

i noted in another comment that this ga cracker repo will only work on passes that resemble the ones it is trained on, but like all genetic algos is aggressively ineffective on inputs resembling anything else

as for programming the practice, it is embarrassingly redundant and consistent due to the structure of programming being based on grammars and logic

so imagine a program that has a data set

you need ten bits of information about that data set, like max, min, mean, etc..

so you write 10 individual functions to loop over the data and interpret it

that is all very consistent behavior and code

now imagine you write a simple genetic algorithm that can interpret your interests and write those simple loops for you on the fly

ten functions of 10 lines each is 100 lines of code

one function of 30 lines that can generate then discard those ten previous functions gives your program a 70 line and immeasurable man hour advantage

think if a search engine needed an engineer to explicitly write the discovery function of every possible query, it would be impractical, so instead you imagine generalisations that permit simple functions to take many varying inputs and produce many varying outputs

what i think the parent comment is suggesting is that these generalisation functions themselves could be built by computers and one possible method being genetic algorithms

furthering the abstraction

all puns intended




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