Algorithmic Darwinism

The workshop on computational theories of evolution started off on Monday, March 17th with Leslie Valiant — one of the organizers — introducing his model of evolvability (Valiant, 2009). This original name was meant to capture what type of complexity can be achieved through evolution. Unfortunately — especially at this workshop — evolvability already had a different, more popular meaning in biology: mechanisms that make an organism or species ‘better’ at evolving, in the sense of higher mutations rates, de novo genes, recombination through sex, etc. As such, we need a better name and I am happy to take on the renaming task.