Deepen the sexual-reproduction frame before entering the full society, on
the two facets GG chose: landscape robustness and directed recombination.
Adds a Kauffman NK landscape (genotype.nk_fitness, tunable ruggedness),
finite n-parent crossover (genotype.crossover, per-gap recombination rate),
and hill-climb (parents = local optima = trained models).
E9 (recomb_landscape) -- the "why sex?" test: E8's dramatic super-parent
result used an ADDITIVE landscape. On rugged/epistatic landscapes, blindly
recombining local optima causes OUTBREEDING DEPRESSION -- offspring fall
below the parents, worse with both ruggedness and recombination rate (K=8,
free recomb: ~ -0.23), and the optimal recombination rate shrinks as
ruggedness grows. Design rule: merge freely when skills are complementary/
additive; sparingly (and with selection) when entangled.
E10 (directed_sex) -- directed sex beats biological sex: biology is stuck
with 2 random-mating parents and no offspring preview; an AI can choose
complementary mates, evaluate many recombinant offspring, keep the fittest,
and use unbounded parents (iterated recombine-then-select). Random
("biological") sex craters with ruggedness (0.66->0.51); directed sex
tracks/exceeds the best parent at every ruggedness -- converting the
outbreeding-depression catastrophe into a win. No biological analog.
Complete sexual-transmission picture: dramatic super-parent offspring when
skills are complementary (E8); outbreeding-depression risk when entangled
(E9); directed sex resolves the risk (E10). configs/layer1/{E9,E10}.yaml,
figures/plot_{E9,E10}.py, READMEs, +5 tests (117 green).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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The Lamarckian Society — Layer 1 (analytical core)
A parametric population-genetics model of knowledge transmission across generations of
learning agents. Knowledge transmission is modelled literally as a Wright–Fisher
process (not by analogy): a model's knowledge is a distribution p_t over K discrete
items; a fixed true distribution p* has a rare tail; each generational step is
"sample from the parent (drift) + mix in fresh real samples (grounding/immigration) +
refit." Model collapse is the loss of rare alleles under drift.
See paper/blueprint.md (the normative build spec) and
paper/the-lamarckian-society-v4.md (the perspective paper).
Reproduce
Environment is a uv venv built from the committed, hash-pinned uv.lock — that
lockfile is the single source of truth for "it runs" (Layer 1 is pure NumPy/SciPy and
bitwise-reproducible from a seed; no container needed).
# one-time: install uv (https://astral.sh/uv)
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
uv sync # build .venv from uv.lock
make test # correctness + scientific-validation tests (the spine of trust)
make layer1 # run experiments E1–E6
make figures # regenerate figures from committed results
Layout
src/knowledge/ Layer 1 package (imported as `knowledge`)
configs/layer1/ one YAML per experiment (E1..E6)
figures/ plot_EX.py — read results.parquet only
tests/ test_correctness.py + test_scientific_validation.py (analytic checks)
paper/ blueprint.md, perspective paper, figure_manifest.md
results/ written artifacts (gitignored; hashes tracked in manifest.json)