 Are there any very long term genetic programming experiments?
bh23ha: I believe the problem is with ever advancing hardware. The new chips are much faster and would "overtake" an experiment that's been running.This problem is sometimes described as putting colonists on a space ship and sending then off. They travel for generations but before arriving they are overtaken by another ship which started several generations later, but was much faster because technology back on Earth kept advancing.Then there's the problem with convergence. Even on a scale as large and complicated as Earth creature often reach an adaptive maximum which tends to keep them the same until an external shock. Think sharks, or punctuated equilibrium.In a computer the simulation will also quickly reach a maximum and there's only so large and complex a simulation can be before you're talking crazy money for the machines. Without crazy money the simulation could hardly be complex enough to keep evolving for ever.Obviously we have game-of-life like algorithms which can generate new patterns for ever, but they are not under selective pressure.