Maybe not so much the implications. If our science is defined by symmetry, beauty, anything - and it is, because so much of physics is literally about looking for symmetries of various kinds - why are we ignoring the loud hints from ML solutions that this is a limiting heuristic?
> why are we ignoring the loud hints from ML solutions that this is a limiting heuristic?
This comes up a lot and always strikes me as rather anti-science, even anti-rationality in general. To speed run the typical progression of this argument, someone says alchemy and astrology occasionally "work" too if you're determined to ignore the failures. This point is then shot down by a recap about the success of QM despite Einstein's objections, success of the standard model even with lots of quasi-empiricism etc, etc.
Structurally though.. if you want to claim that the universe is fundamentally weird and unknowable, it's very easy to argue this, because you can always ignore the success of past theory and formalisms by saying that "it was nice while it lasted but we've squeezed all the juice out of that and are in a new regime now". Next you challenge your detractors to go ahead and produce a clean beautiful symmetric theory of everything to prove you wrong. That's just rhetoric though, and arguments from model/information/complexity theory etc about fundamental limits on what's computable and decidable and compressible would be much more satisfying and convincing. When does finding a complicated thing that works actually rule out a simpler model that you've missed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length#MDL...
Because you can never be sure with the ML stuff. Perhaps it was 1 iteration away from finding a solution that was better and also symmetric. Perhaps it it a great, but not optimal, local maxima.
Lacking symmetry, it's extremely hard to understand how the antenna actually works (i.e. why those six bends, as opposed to any other random six bends).
My best guess is that the edges are oriented such that at the tested frequencies they cause constructive interference inside the antenna therefore boosting the signal. The orientation is weird because that's probably the best way to make it work in all directions, if the edges were in a flat plane, the constructive interference would only work in a single direction.
I mean sure, but how do you figure out what directions and angles to bend it in? I don't know much about signals and radio and stuff, but it feels to me like this could only be achieved through trial and error until the ideal was found, which is what evolutionary arguments are designed for.
I've had bugs go away when I added `print("working fine until here")` to the preceding line. So if someone told me "this line is needed but I don't know why", I wouldn't even blink.
Back in the day the QA department would veto a release candidate of our firewall product due to performance degradation if a network cable in the testing equipment was bent too much during validation runs. Rearrange the cable and next test run would pass.
