Strange

Yes we do. Apart from a few details, this was largely worked out by Wallace and Darwin some time ago.

There is no specific law against walking down the road naked in the UK. One famous and persistent nude walker was arrested several times and jailed for other things like "causing a breach of the peace".

You have posted almost identical drivel before. Multiple times. You are using a typically dishonest pseduoscience / creationist tactic of taking some data from one source (humans vs chimps) and then using some magic handwaving to say "therefore this other case must be really huge". I assume either you are too lazy to find data on whales or you know it wouldn't support your claims. This is a stunningly stupid argument. So, just out of curiosity, what in your view drives evolution? God? Aliens? Magic?

This is exactly the case I was describing. The polygon is the convex hull that encloses the points. So I think this hinges on what you mean by the "greatest" area. From my perspective this is the smallest area that includes all the points. One could create a larger polygon that includes all the points but not a smaller one.

That is not what you linked to originally. I was commenting on the article you linked to. I can't see where I said that. But I did point out that you need to specify the constraints that you claim are being optimised for. There is no such thing as just "optimising". As dimreeper says, I'm not sure this is a very accurate characterisation of evolution. Also, in many (nearly all) cases it doesn't relate to intelligence. Not sure what "candidates for optimising cognitive tasks" means. Do you mean that evolution should act on human populations to increase intelligence? There doesn't seem to be any evidence of that. Like everything else evolution does, the intelligence of humans reached a level that was useful and, since then, various other evolutionary changes have occurred, driven by local conditions. So, ignoring the fact tat this is pure speculation / science-fiction at the moment, what are these cognitive tasks and in what way do they need to be optimized (i.e. what are the constraints)? And, finally, why do you believe this is "life's purpose"? Is the purpose of plankton to "optimise cognitive tasks"? Or is it to be a food source for other organisms? Or is it simply to maximise (optimise, if you will) the reproduction of their genes?

I would have thought it would be the smallest area. After all, if all the points lie on the convex hull, then that is the shortest route and also the smallest area (that encompasses all the points). You should be able to prove that it is the shortest route by showing that swapping each point with any other produces a longer route. Off the top of my head, that seems be polynomial in the number of routes rather than exponential. So it should be quicker to check than generate the route.

OK. So what was discussed in the first two posts.

Isn’t that for finding area? Not sure how/if it can be applied here. Yes. You should be able to prove, mathematically, that the algorithm produces the shortest route. The implementation can then be tested on some small cases.

So you could use the to estimate how long the light would last. If you decide on a size of the box, you can work out how long the light will take to bounce from one side to the other using the speed of light. Each bounce will reduce the level. Two bounces will reduce it by 97% x 97%. After 100 bounces it will be reduced to about 5% of the original level. After 1000 bounces it will be 0.0000000000059% (pretty much gone!). So work out how long 1000 reflections take and that will give you some sort of answer. I don't think so.

Oh, I see what you mean. Sorry.

It would take you a few seconds to generate a sample problem. It would take a few minutes to write a program to generate problems of any size.

Except we know dark matter(or, sigh, something that causes the effects that can be modelled as dark matter) exists but there is no reason to think tachyons exist. And the existence of tachyons is irrelevant. Quantum field theory works perfectly well in 4D spacetime. Do you have any evidence to back up this assertion? The universe still exists so I don't know what you are basing this idea of it being "unstable" on.

As far as I know, the only way of checking it is to test it on small problems where all routes can be generated. Then (because it is an algorithm) you can prove it works for larger cases. And, prove that it still runs in polynomial time.

With the best mirrors we can create today, I guess it would be picoseconds at best. Actually, there was another thread about this recently (it is quite a popular question) and I have a vague recollection of someone estimating how long it could last ...

Perhaps you can quote the specific sections from the article about Jeremy England that supports your claim. Because I can't see anything and, as I say, the only mention of optimisation contradicts you. It is no use just repeating the claim that is is evidence, when it doesn't appear to be. Or, maybe better still, reference some science (by England or someone else) that supports you claim. I would ask the same about the Wikipedia article about thermodynamics which doesn't mention life, evolution or optimisation. So could you explain exactly how it supports your claim. I don't, I'm afraid. I am still waiting for you to provide one.

There isn't much to go on here. What are these graphs of? If the x axis represents time, then I guess you want to look at Fourier transforms.

Sorry I was a bit brief - I was using my phone. What I meant to imply was that "all frames" includes the frames of all observers. "Observer"in this context just means "the measurements from another frame of reference".

I guess it means you have made a mistake somewhere. I can’t make much sense of your scribbled notes, but the bits I can read appear to be wrong; e.g. “speed = gravity” makes no sense. Gravity, in some contexts, can be described in terms of acceleration. But not speed.

"for all inertial frames"

I am simply pointing out that you have not provided any evidence to support your claim. As you seem to think that there are many papers on this, it should be simple for you t provide a reference.

Anything (almost) is possible. And nothing is ever really proven. Entanglement is explained without needing extra time dimensions. I’m not aware of any theories needing extra time dimensions. It may be impossible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime#Privileged_character_of_3+1_spacetime

Good point. (I thought it might be more detail than the OP needed, though!) Until you start to take relativity of simultaneity into account, maybe...

But you cited that article in support of your claim that evolution is an optimising process. I am just pointing out that the article does not appear to support that claim. If you think it does, please quote the specific part(s) that support your claim. Does "something like a local optimum" mean you are using this as an analogy? Or can you actually provide a reference from these "papers by Jeremy et al, or other work" that supports your position? Can you please explain the relevance or significance of these papers to your argument? Well, you still haven't explained the connection. So can you provide references towhees papers? But you still haven't explained the relevance of this to evolution or, more importantly, the "purpose of life". I am glad you are not going to try and argue that trees or yeast are intelligent. That really would take us into a bizarre rabbit hole. However, you haven't yet shown that evolution concerns optimisation (you claim it does and you claim there are papers that support this view but you haven't yet provided evidence of either) so you appear to be undermining your own argument. Even if evolution can be seen as a local optimisation (and I am not arguing against that) I still don't see the connection between that and intelligence. And I don't see the connection between general AI and evolution. Can I summarise what I think you are saying and then maybe you can correct or fill in the gaps: The purpose of life is optimisation Evolution does this already General AI will be better at optimisation than evolution Therefore our goal should be to develop general AI to replace evolution. Is that right? But optimisation only makes sense in the context of some constraints that have to be optimised for. So, for example, that is why some organisms appear to be unchanged for millions of years: they are already a good fit to their environment. So what is this AI supposed to be optimising, and what is it supposed to optimise it for?

Absolutely. There is something called the equivalence principle that says that acceleration and gravity are indistinguishable. So (assuming you can't look out of the window!) you would no be able to tell if you were stationary in Earth's gravity or accelerating at 1g. Correct.

I'm sure. But the article you cited doesn't appear to support your claim. Perhaps you need to provide a reference to something (ideally a published paper) that does? Again, the article you cited said nothing about optimisation. Also, nothing to do with life's purpose. Perhaps you need to explain the relevance? Can you explain how this is relevant to evolution, optimisation and/or the purpose of life? But that has nothing to do with evolution or the purpose of life. Perhaps you could explain the connection? Not really my job to do that. Especially as you haven't yet provided any evidence that it does. I simply asked what would disprove your hypothesis. You still haven't answered that. A tree. Or yeast. But if you are going to extend the meaning of intelligence to include those then you probably need to define what you think the word "intelligence" means.