Risto Miikkulainen: Neuroevolution and Evolutionary Computation | Lex Fridman Podcast #177

The following is a conversation with Risto Mikolainen, a computer scientist at University of Texas at Austin, and associate vice president of Evolutionary Artificial Intelligence at Cognizant. He specializes in evolutionary computation, but also many other topics in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and neuroscience. Quick mention of our sponsors: Jordan Harbinger Show, Grammarly, Belcampo, and Indeed. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that nature-inspired algorithms from ant colony optimization, to genetic algorithms, to cellular automata, to neural networks have always captivated my imagination, not only for their surprising power in the face of long odds, but because they always opened up doors to new ways of thinking about computation. It does seem that in the long arc of computing history running toward biology, not running away from it, is what leads to long term progress. This is the Lex Fridman podcast, and here is my conversation with Risto Mikolainen. If we ran the Earth experiment, this fun little experiment we're on, over and over and over and over a million times and watched the evolution of life as it, uh, pans out, how much variation in the outcomes of that evolution do you think we would see?

Mm-hmm.

Now, we should say that you are a computer scientist.

That's actually not such a bad question for computer scientist, because we are building simulations of these things, and we are simulating evolution. Uh, and that's a difficult question to answer in biology, but we can build a computational model-

(laughs)

... and run it million times.

Yes.

And actually answer that question, how much variation do we see when we, when we simulate it. Uh, and, um, you know, that's a little bit beyond what we can do today (laughs) , but, but I think that we will see some regularities. Uh, and it took evolution also a really long time to get started, and then things accelerated really fast, uh, towards the end. Uh, but there are things that need to be discovered, and they probably will be over and over again, like manipulation, uh, of objects, uh, opposable thumbs, and, um, and also some way to communicate, uh, maybe orally like why we have speech. It might be some other kind of sounds. Um, and, and decision-making, but also vision. Uh, eye has evolved many times, uh, various vision systems have evolved. So we would see those kinds of solutions, I believe, emerge over and over again. They may look a little different, but they, they get the job done. The really interesting question is, would we have primates? Would we have humans or something that resembles humans? Uh, and, and would that be an apex (laughs) of evolution after a while? Um, we don't know where we're going from here, but we certainly see a lot of tool use and, and building, uh, or constructing our environment. So I think that we will get that. Uh, that we get some e- evolution producing some agents that can do that, manipulate the environment and build.