Sunday, January 20, 2008

Halo: Intelligent Design or Evolution

I've decided that I haven't irritated my evolution-friendly readers enough lately, so here's a post designed to do exactly that. (Actually, most of the irritation is in the title, because I'm pitting design against chance, and chance isn't a good representation of evolution without an extended argument about whether or not chance is a fair representation. But I digress...)

This halo video poses an interesting question: How do we assign probabilities of various events to past outcomes? (Here is another example.)

Were the kills in these videos designed or random chance? If they were designed, was this the first try or were there many attempts? Was the grenade death the intended goal, or merely a side-effect of another goal? Were the videos faked? (Note that just because the videos faithfully render a genuinely possible scenario in the halo universe doesn't mean that they aren't faked. Of course, if they render an impossible scenario, they are certainly fakes.)

Here's the tricky part: Can we decisively differentiate between the possibilities from just the video? Assume we can't communicate with the original posters, are the videos, a community of experts, and our own XBox 360s enough to settle the question?

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