Turing's Cathedral

Turing drew a parallel between intelligence and the “genetical or evolutionary search by which a combination of genes is looked for, the criteria being survival value. The remarkable success of this search confirms to some extent the idea that intellectual activity consists mainly of various kinds of search.” Evolutionary computation would lead to truly intelligent machines. “Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates a child's?” he asked. “Bit by bit one would be able to allow the machine to make more and more 'choices' or 'decisions.' One would eventually find it possible to programme it so as to make its behaviour the result of a comparatively small number of general principles. When these become sufficiently general, interference would no longer be necessary, and the machine would have 'grown up.'”...

...Organisms that evolve in a digital universe are going to be very different from us. To us, they will appear to be evolving ever faster, but to them, our evolution will appear to have been decelerating at their moment of creation – the way our universe appears to have suddenly begun to cool after the big bang. Ulam's speculations were correct. Our time is become the prototime for something else.

-- from Turing's Cathedral: the Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson (pages 262 and 302)

See also Infinite complexity from finite rules