Gpuccio has made a series of comments at Uncommon Descent and I thought they could form the basis of an opening post. The comments following were copied and pasted from Gpuccio’s comments starting here
To onlooker and to all those who have followed thi discussion:
I will try to express again the procedure to evaluate dFSCI and infer design, referring specifically to Lizzies “experiment”. I will try also to clarify, while I do that, some side aspects that are probably not obvious to all.
Moreover, I will do that a step at a time, in as many posts as nevessary.
So, let’s start with Lizzie’s “experiment”:
Creating CSI with NS
Posted on March 14, 2012 by Elizabeth
Imagine a coin-tossing game. On each turn, players toss a fair coin 500 times. As they do so, they record all runs of heads, so that if they toss H T T H H H T H T T H H H H T T T, they will record: 1, 3, 1, 4, representing the number of heads in each run.At the end of each round, each player computes the product of their runs-of-heads. The person with the highest product wins.
In addition, there is a House jackpot. Any person whose product exceeds 1060 wins the House jackpot.
There are 2500 possible runs of coin-tosses. However, I’m not sure exactly how many of that vast number of possible series would give a product exceeding 1060. However, if some bright mathematician can work it out for me, we can work out whether a series whose product exceeds 1060 has CSI. My ballpark estimate says it has.
That means, clearly, that if we randomly generate many series of 500 coin-tosses, it is exceedingly unlikely, in the history of the universe, that we will get a product that exceeds 1060.
However, starting with a randomly generated population of, say 100 series, I propose to subject them to random point mutations and natural selection, whereby I will cull the 50 series with the lowest products, and produce “offspring”, with random point mutations from each of the survivors, and repeat this over many generations.
I’ve already reliably got to products exceeding 1058, but it’s
possible that I may have got stuck in a local maximum.
However, before I go further: would an ID proponent like to tell me whether, if I succeed in hitting the jackpot, I have satisfactorily refuted Dembski’s case? And would a mathematician like to check the jackpot?
I’ve done it in MatLab, and will post the script below. Sorry I don’t speak anything more geek-friendly than MatLab (well, a little Java, but MatLab is way easier for this) Continue reading