You may be know, for my Day Job I am a Ph.D. student at the Sanger Institute just outside Cambridge, doing lots of exciting things with genomes and the like. However, as you may not know (but, to be honest, are just as likely to as not), as my Thing On The Side I study evolutionary algorithms with my previous supervisor Yogi Jaeger. In my first Fancy Perk of being a full-time researcher, I will be going to Amsterdam later this month to give a talk at the University of Amsterdam on a comparison between two algorithms.
Now I think the details of the comparison are actually pretty interesting to a lay-person, especially because they lead to some idle speculation about the nature of evolutionary forces. Now, Yogi generally doesn’t like me speculating about such things, since he thinks it isn’t rigorous, and he points out that lots of people far smarter than me spend their time doing advanced theoretical studies about the constraints and capacities of the evolutionary process. However, I know that you, my most kind blogventurer, will not raise such objections. And thus, once again I will subject you to my idle musing.
Continue reading