Human-based evolutionary computation: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 05:49, 21 October 2006

Revision as of 05:55, 21 October 2006

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Wikipedia software is the best illustration of working human-based evolution strategy in this context and maybe generally. Its initialization operator is the page creation. Its mutation operator is the incremental page edit. Wiki selection operator is less salient. It is provided by revision history and ability to select between the previous versions via revert operation. If the page is vandalised and no longer a good fit to its title, a reader can easily go to the revision history and select one of the previos revisions that fits best (hopefully, the previous one). This selection feature is very crucial to the success of such collaborative projects as Wikipedia.

An interesting fact is that wiki software was created in 1995, but it took at least another 6 years for large wiki-based collaborative projects to appear. Why did it take so long? One explanation to this fact is that the original wiki software was lacking selection operation and hence it couldn't effectively support content evolution. The addition of revision history and emergencerise of large wiki-supported communities coincide in time. From evolutionary computation point of view this is obviousnot surprising: without selection operation the content would undergo aan aimless [[genetic drift]] and waswould quiteunlikely to be useful to uselessanyone. With selection operation, utility of the content have a tendency to improve over time, as beneficial changes accumulate and thatharmful ones are discarded. This is what happens on a large scale in Wikipedia.

[[Category:Human-based computation]]