Comment by robertskmiles
13 years ago
The 'set and forget' aspect of this is appealing. I've sometimes wondered if you could automate the whole thing, including option generation. If you can define good enough mutation functions you could have your features literally evolve over time, without developer input. You'd need a lot of throughput to get reasonable evolution rates though. Jacking up the mutation rate won't help because really big mutations will break the layout.
It's almost certainly impracticable, but fun to think about.
I'd love to see a website designed entirely by statistical machine learning :-)
Google leans pretty heavily on machine learning for even trivial design choices http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html mentions the infamous testing of 41 shades of bue to decide which was the correct one.
But truly someone has to design the learning system, at some level you will always have design, if it is the design of how the design is to adapt to it's environment.
What's to say those spam websites aren't exactly that?
Well, this website modifies a lot of variables, though it doesn't make everything variable: http://www.metamorphosite.com/about