Giorgio Gilestro
6f8cef1ac5
Removed from main (all preserved on the dev branch): the arXiv build and
its sources, design documents (blueprint, results summary, review responses,
essay drafts), tasks/ and CLAUDE.md, the cover letter and reference tooling,
two unused manuscript figures, and every experiment that feeds no figure or
number in the paper: the collapse null, the sexual-vs-asexual lineage, the
NK speciation variant, the 0.5B single-seed LLM prototypes, the compose and
society experiments with their calibration and pilot runs, and their
configs, runners, tests, figure scripts and PBS jobs. Their result bundles
are moved to results/_archive/ (ignored) so the parquets stay on disk.
Also: plot_llm_speciation reads the s{seed}/ layout; the mating-breadth
plot writes under its bundle name; Makefile targets reduced to the kept
experiments; REPRODUCING.md and README point to dev for the rest.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Y64o8FKP7rCuXzC48pxpMm
|
||
|---|---|---|
| .. | ||
| figS11_directed_recombination.pdf | ||
| figS11_directed_recombination.png | ||
| manifest.json | ||
| README.md | ||
| resolved_config.yaml | ||
E10 — directed sex beats biological sex (the distinctly-AI superpower)
Claim tested. E9 showed that on rugged (epistatic) landscapes, blind recombination causes outbreeding depression — offspring worse than parents. Biology is largely stuck with this: two random-mating parents, no way to preview offspring. But an AI is not — it can choose mates, evaluate many recombinant offspring, and keep only the fittest, over rounds, with no two-parent limit. Does this directed sex rescue recombination where blind sex fails?
Setup. Parents are local optima of a Kauffman NK landscape (L=12), swept over ruggedness K.
Three strategies compared, all as deployed capability (fitness ∈ [0,1]): best single parent;
random sex (blind mating, free recombination, no offspring selection — biology's default);
directed sex (iterated recombine-then-select-offspring, rate=0.2, 5 rounds — the AI move).
24 replicate landscapes.
Symbols
- random sex — blind: random parents, free recombination, take the offspring as they come.
- directed sex — choose complementary mates + generate many offspring + keep the fittest + repeat; unbounded parents.
- global optimum — the landscape's best genotype (the ceiling).
The two panels
- Capability vs ruggedness. As
Kgrows, random sex (blue) craters (0.66 → 0.51 — deep outbreeding depression), while directed sex (red) tracks the best parent and the global optimum, staying near the ceiling at every ruggedness. - Edge over the best parent. Directed sex stays ≥ 0 (at or above the parents) across all
K; random sex falls to ≈ −0.2 (far below). Directed sex converts a catastrophe into a win.
Takeaway
The move biology cannot make — choose your mates, evaluate your offspring before you commit, and recombine as many parents as you like — is exactly what makes AI sexual reproduction robust. Blind merging of entangled models is dangerous; directed merging (generate many candidate merges, keep the best) is safe and can exceed every parent. This is the practical payoff of the sexual-transmission model and the distinctly-AI superpower with no biological analog. Falsifier (not triggered): if directed sex did no better than random sex, or never recovered the best-parent level on rugged landscapes, the "AI beats biology" claim would fail.