It is after midnight, must be time for DB Forum. This is what happens when you try to have "other lives."
Numsgil:
One thing Paul, what do you mean by generational turnover? I agree that speeding up mutations means that you need a way to speed up the removal of deleterious mutations from the population.
Light:
Isn't generational turnover the average time it takes for one generation to die and another to take over, so for humans it would be like 70 or basically the lifespan of a bot. A high turnover would be a bot with a short lifespan
Bingo!
Create a bot with a very short lifespan, turn up the mutation rate and PRESTO CHANGEO, instant evolutionary timescales!
Actually, this is more difficult than it appears since you must balance the lifespan with the mutation rates in such a way as to have a few mutations per generation while having enough lifespan to experience selective pressures thus testing the mutations.
Too high a mutation rate and the population mutates further before natural selection gets to do its selection thing in succeeding generations and may indeed mutate a good mutation right off the table before it can spread. Too short a lifespan and everybody dies of "old age" before natural selection gets to do its selection thing since the bot has no time to test the mutation by dodging predators or becoming more energy efficient prior to breeding before it dies.
Now that's a mouthful.
Anyway, depending upon the sim being attempted (mine being pressures of sexual selection criteria over lots and lots of generations, or atleast [you]would[/you] be if [begin hint] I had a working .sexrepro capability [end hint]) shortening lifespans and speeding up mutation rates can achieve much faster results. If I find the right balance I hope to cut a million cycles off my sims while maintaining the mutation rate per generation and the same number of generations. For me that's many hours of compute time.
BTW, the "Cambrian Explosion" of new phyla (including almost all present day body plans) lasted some 50+- million years. Paleontologists have a rather strange sense of time. Though considering the prior 4 billion years, I suppose 50 million can be considered as somewhat of a "short" period, right? Riiight.