"Criticality and Parallelism in Combinatorial Optimization" by William G.
Macready, Athanasios G. Siapas and Stuart A. Kauffman, ppp 56-59 of the 5
January 1996 issue of Science.
I have only skimmed through the first page or so and read the abstract, but
it seems to me their arguments may have something to say about the
phenomenon of stasis in evolutionary theory. They consider a problem in
which parallel implementations of simulated annealing are used to minimize
a performance index defined by one of Stu Kauffman's NK models, and find
that as as the number of parallel solutions increases, problem solution
speed increases for a while, but a point is reached where the speed of
solution is suddenly degraded. They compare it to a phase change
phenomenon. It could be argued that similar things happen in evolution of
a biological population. Many individuals are reproducing, givng rise to
many variations. Most variations are swamped out by the size of the
population, leading to stasis. Niles Eldredge makes arguments like this in
"Reinventing Darwin" (1995).
Bill Hamilton | Vehicle Systems Research
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