Dear Resident Theists

[Angrboda]

There was a person behind initial programming.  There was no person designing it to have those capabilities.  That's the point.  While the initial scaffolding is designed by a person, the antennae and checkers playing abilities evolved without human input.  What is the relevance of the initial conditions to the final outputs?

We might ask whether your parents were responsible for you and your abilities?  If we are talking about your initial configuration, the answer may be yes.  But if we're referring to skills you learned later in life, it's disingenuous to say that it was all your parents' input.  Clearly there is a distinction to be made here between the initial programming and the final result.  Or do you not take credit for anything which you learn on your own?

But you see the point is this is basically analogous to Deism.  There is an initial creator of intelligence that sets forth the initial parameters that will allow the complexity to emerge.  It still requires an intelligent first cause.  The examples you gave are not unguided, but require an intelligent first cause.

The point is not that this is a complete analogy to the beginning of the universe, but that complex, purposeful behavior can arise without the intervention of designing intelligence.  And the emphasis is on designing intelligence, because your deism in effect "programmed in" the parameters for success.  Not so with the examples I gave.  If you want to analogize it to deism, it's a deism in which the parameters were randomly created, which is no different from naturalism.  The strategies that the neural nets employed were arrived at through a process of random variation followed by selection for success.  The strategies weren't "designed" by the programmers and the criterion for success offered no gap into which to insert design.  The examples I gave were indeed "unguided".  You keep wanting to imply that the initial programming had something to do with the final success; it didn't.  And so it amply shows the creation of complex, purposeful behavior and objects without the intervention of a designing intellect.  It does not "require" an intelligent first cause if by require you mean that the ability of the checkers playing automatons is in some way caused by the intelligence of the designers of the program.  It wasn't.  The intelligence of the automatons is a product of their evolution, not of the initial design of the program.

Can you explain to me how the design of the program (below) influenced the design of the checkers playing automatons?

Experiments described here indicate that, in contrast, a machine learning algorithm based on the principles of Darwinian evolution can generate an expert-level checkers playing program without relying on any specific credit assignment (….). Furthermore, this level of play is attained without using features about the game that would require human expertise. Only the position of the pieces on the board, the spatial characteristics of the checkerboard, and the piece differential are made available as explicit data to be processed. The evolutionary algorithm optimizes a population of artificial neural networks (i.e., networked layers of nonlinear processing elements) that are used to evaluate the worth of alternative potential positions. The procedure starts from a collection of completely random networks that then compete against each other for survival and the right to generate offspring networks through a process of random variation. [Performance was measured by a points system: Each program earned one point for a win, none for a draw, and two points were subtracted for a loss. After the poor programs were eliminated, the process was repeated with a new population derived from the winners. -Wikipedia] Survival is determined by the quality of play in a series of checkers games played against opponents from the same population. Over successive generations of variation and selection, the surviving neural networks extract information from the game and improve their performance. The best-evolved neural network has been played against 165 human opponents over the Internet and has earned an expert rating at a well-known gaming web site (http://www.zone.com). The details on the evolutionary approach, the evaluation of the best neural network’s rating, and the results of control experiments are offered below.

Evolving an Expert Checkers Playing Program without Using Human Expertise [emphasis mine]