All of clwainwright's Comments + Replies

This seems like a good definition of optimization for algorithmic systems, but I don't see how it works for physical systems. Going by the primary definition,

An optimizing system is a system that has a tendency to evolve towards one of a set of configurations that we will call the target configuration set, when started from any configuration within a larger set of configurations, which we call the basin of attraction.

But in the physical world, there are literally zero closed systems with this property. Entropy always increases*, and the target configu... (read more)