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We've all seen a giraffe. It has a long neck. Why? Some people would argue that giraffes 'evolved' long necks to make it easier for them to reach food high up in trees. Namely that natural mutations in early giraffes led to varieties that became better and better at doing something important to their survivial. Eating. A simple analogy of this theory of evolution is what drives the images on this site to mutate over time. The images exist in a 'population' that mutates from generation to generation. But clearly the images don't need to evolve long necks to survive. What pressures them to change in a meaningful way? We do. Users on the site decide which images look most like a certain idea or topic. The ones that fail are killed off. In the giraffe analogy, these 'bad' images have short necks and all the food is high in the trees. The 'good' images (the one's users like) go on to produce new generations of images that look like them, but are a little bit different (hopefully a little bit 'better'). As time goes on the images mutate in ways that make them look more and more like users think they should. |