P vs. NP in Evolution

I got sent a video a couple of days ago where a hard core christian and an atheist were talking about the development (evolution) of the human species and in general our world and universe. The christian basically quoted the bible and stated that god created the heavens and the earth in six days and rested on the seventh with her argument being that something as complex as human life doesn’t just happen by chance or on accident. The atheist said that he believes in science. Now this isn’t a post about religion by any means, but the Christian’s main argument was that because life and our world were so complex, there is no way that it could’ve ended up that way by pure luck/chance/evolution.

I think that this is very obviously the only possible way. Obviously this is the key observation in evolution, but as a computer scientist and someone who believes in the simulation hypothesis to a certain extent, evolution is exactly a problem that can only be solved in a non-deterministic way. What I want to say with this is that there are only two possible explanations to the development of life on Earth. A set of deterministic instructions and rules or a stochastic/non-deterministic learning algorithm with a set of very very tight constraints. Since one can imagine the optimization problem of life as being extremely computationally difficult to solve, one could philosophically derive that it is in the NP space of decidable problems. The non-deterministic solution just seems more plausible from a computational stand point. It’s easy to verify that we are all alive.

Of course I can very easily say all of this, but “something like a carpenter wouldn’t assume the moon is made of wood just because that’s his expertise.”

Black holes compute in a non-deterministic way.

Neural networks search in the NP-Hard space. I will expand on this more, in a future post.

Also please read this.