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In a celebrated passage of The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins writes: “It is raining instructions out there; it’s raining programs; it’s raining … algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth.” This picture can be formalised through an algorithmic reworking of the infinite monkey theorem: replace monkeys at typewriters with monkeys at universal computers. The result is a clear: random mutation does not sample phenotypic space uniformly but instead generates an exponential bias toward simple outcomes describable by short algorithms.
