It's still in a class of pure "guessing" because just because something looks "correct" early on is meaningless two steps into the future. Everything will have a 50/50 probability of being "correct" based on any given scenario. What you're saying is somewhat analogous to predicting that a coin flip will land on 'heads' if it landed on heads at the last flip, or even 20 of the last flips in a row. I'm actually not a great statistician myself, but I think I'm right on this one. :)
>It's still in a class of pure "guessing" because just because something looks "correct" early on is meaningless two steps into the future.
It's true that a "good" decision now might turn out to be "bad" later, but whether it's effective in improving a solution depends on the fraction of times that happens, which is almost certainly not 50%. Hill-climbing methods like this are used everywhere in optimisation when you want a decent solution quickly and don't require optimality.
>somewhat analogous to predicting that a coin flip will land on 'heads' if it landed on heads at the last flip
I'm no statistician either, but this is not analogous at all.
What you described wasn't Hill Climbing at all tho. You have to be able to take the derivative of a function to do that. The derivative is what tells you how to "go uphill" (or down)
Well you're right there's infinite variations of algos that all can legitimately be called hill-climb. It's about as generic as the term "curve fitting".
I just mean with the known complexity and nature of Game of Life, trying to guess things based on an objective function, when going back in time, seems no more efficient than trying to guess coin flips, based on prior flips. There's probably some Logic Theorem (sorry I don't know it) that describes why objective functions cannot be used to help solve the backwards Game of Life problem.
It's a complexity problem like which butterfly "caused" a tornado, or which initial clumping of rocks "caused" a black hole, because there are infinite numbers of solutions. Like how many initial GoL boards are there that result in a particular final state? I say for any final state there will be infinite possible starting states that can lead up to it.
