Evolution

Daylight Atheism has a great article on Evolutionary Algorithms. I've used such algorithms myself to solve complex mathematical problems in a quicker and more efficient manner than brute force methods.

Evolutionary Algorithms are great because what you have to define is not how to solve the problem, but some measure of how close a particular guess at a solution is to the correct answer. This is often easier! This measure of fitness is basically the "environment", and as we know, evolution fits the population to the environment. Then all you do is start your population off with random guesses, breed and mutate the fittest (the ones that are closest to the solution) and you'll rapidly get a very accurate answer.

Perhaps the best thing about coding up these algorithms is that it teaches us how evolution works, that evolution works well to solve problems, and that randomness and mutation are key to it working, and they're used to solve problems, not make a mess.

Loosing My Religion and Current Reading

I just got William Lobdell's Loosing My Religion book. Taking a quick glance through, it looks pretty good, and I'll put more words on this book together as I read it. It should be interesting. I emailed William when he first announced his loss of faith, and it will be great to read the full details of the story.

I'm a few chapters into Raising Freethinkers: A Guide to Parenting Beyond Belief. It's reading well so far, if a bit US-centric. There's some great ideas in there for helping children think for themselves, and I liked the suggestion of watching "Twelve Angry Men" as a movie to encourage free thought, as that's a favourite movie of mine!

Finally, I'm mostly through Is God A Mathematician? by Mario Livio. The mathematical history is always good to read, although I've read so much history of math recently, so it would certainly have been nice to read more about mathematicians I don't know about! Personally, I'm on the side of mathematics being found, not made, so it will be interesting to see how the argument in the book develops.