Natural things as ML systems

Evolution.

• Evolutionary landscape talks about:
  • fitness function
  • environment
  • organisms
  • genes (the selfish gene)
  • evolution
• This maps onto ML systems pretty well:
  • fitness = objective function/loss.
  • environment = the distribution.
  • evolution = optimizer.
  • genes = the parameters.
• the genome instantiates a generative model of the organism