

The Illusion Machine That Teaches Us How We See - pmcpinto
http://nautil.us/issue/19/illusions/the-illusion-machine-that-teaches-us-how-we-see

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mtdewcmu
Cool. It seems to make the common argument that "since evolution is random, it
makes mistakes, therefore we see illusions." I disagree with this logic. I
think it would be truer to say "since visual processing resources are
(inherently) limited, evolution makes trade-offs, therefore we see illusions."
I see jumping to the most-likely conclusion about what we see as more of a
power-minimizing and performance-maximizing trade-off than a design flaw.

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JoeAltmaier
It may be a mistake to assume evolution 'designed' anything at all. Its a
drunkard's walk over the solution space. As soon as a relative optimum point
is reached, evolution tends to stick there and not search for further, more-
optimum solutions.

Witness the 'thumb' of a panda, which is uses to strip leaves from the
eucalyptus branch. It has a thumb (toe on its paw) but no, evolution chose to
extend a wrist bone in a kind of protuberance; the panda pulls the branch
between that and its arm to strip leaves. Not ideal; kinda weird really. But
evolution doesn't give a flip.

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mtdewcmu
Evolution doesn't design, clearly. But its solutions are not determined by
chance alone, either. The shapes of the solutions are partly determined by the
contours of the available solution space. It's sort of like pressing soft
material into a mold, I think. The trajectories of the individual bits of
material are governed by chance; but after applying and releasing pressure,
the macroscopic object invariably forms itself in the image of the mold.

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JoeAltmaier
Sure but the 'mold' is a complex surface with many local maximums. Once
evolution reaches a local maximum, then drunkards walk is stalled - it moves
incrementally in any directin - things get worse. It cannot leap across the
gap to another local maximum; ok its unlikely it will make the leap.

So we get different populations with wildly different solutions to the same
problem.

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chairmankaga
There's a video game titled echochrome that touches on this phenomena. Its
puzzle platformer where you have to navigate around obstacles by positioning
the camera into various positions until a path forward or the obstacle is
obscured by the illusion being projected. Very cool!

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devindotcom
On that note, try Antichamber and Perspective, both of which toy very
effectively with your perception of 3D spaces.

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xemoka
Also check out monument valley, they just released an expansion too if you've
already played it.

