More thoughts about the work of Dembski and Marks

More thoughts about Dembski and Marks’ project:

• The fact that the No Free Lunch theorem does not hold for a continuous search domain may have some consequences for the project pursued by Dembski and Marks. (That project, by the way, seems to have inspired at least two blogs devoted to criticizing it, DIEBLOG and Bounded Science. Some interesting points are raised there.) Their idea of studying search algorithms/heuristics for a target, then metaheuristics to select such heuristics, then meta-meta….-heuristics, and so on quickly generates uncountably infinite search domains for the meta-…-heuristics.

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Students trapped in a pub

The Guardian reports that
Leeds University students snowed in for two days at highest pub in UK. Students and teachers from Leeds University were forced to stay two days in a pub, drink lots of beer, and join forces to cook dinner. Sounds like one of the better places one could be trapped for two days in!

Generic optimization in infinitely large search domains

In 1995 and the following few years, Wolpert and Macready published a technical reports and a journal article on what has come to be called the No Free Lunch theorems. These theorems say that all optimization algorithms yield the same average performance in optimizing a completely random function.

Ice block stunt

An isreali illusionist, Hezi Dean, celebrated New Year by breaking the world record for staying inside a block of ice. New record: an impressive 66 hours.