The evolution of chess (cross-posted from Facebook)
As a PhD geneticist, I'm sufficiently conversant with the literature on evolution to recognize that creationism and its silly sibling "intelligent design" are unscientific and useless as a way to understand the world.
Remarkably, there are some folks who take it upon themselves to rebut creationist bafflegab. Some of them post on the Panda's Thumb blog. The math jargon is often above my pay grade, but this post made intuitive sense to me, at least:
"A sticking point among a lot of ID/Creationists seems to be whether information can be generated by a non-intelligent process.
Computer chess provides a very dramatic example. Previously, chess-playing algorithms were designed by software developers in concert with strong human players. In 2017, however, the AlphaZero program was created by initializing a neural net with the rules of chess, and then having it play millions of games against itself, updating its neural net with each game. After 24 hours of such self-play, AlphaZero won a 100-game match against Stockfish, the currently strongest human-designed algorithm, with the score of 28 wins, 82 draws, no losses. (It was not allowed to update its net based on its games with Stockfish, so did not “learn” from playing the champion; all it had was its experience playing against itself.)"
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