the white queen hypothesis

(Quotation 1) Alice laughed. `There's no use trying,' she said `one
ca'n't believe impossible things.'

`I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. `When I was
your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've
believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes
the shawl again!'

(Quotation 2) `Well, in our country,' said Alice, still panting a
little, `you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast
for a long time, as we've been doing.'

`A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. `Now, here, you see, it
takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you
want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as
that!'

(Quotation 2) inspires the Red Queen Hypothesis about co-evolution
(evolutionary change is faster when it runs against a system that is
also changing).

(Quotation 1) should inspire a complementary White Queen Hypothesis,
perhaps a sort of "Fourier Transform" of the Red Queen Hypothesis.
The "impossible thought" might be any given quasi-evolutionary move,
the ability to "try something out" (as when exploring counter-factual
future-histories on the chess board).  Perhaps it describes something
happening in some sort of "co-tangent space": it might be much like
what Tim Teravainen said to me about how it is good to be able to rule
out ideas or variations quickly.

They say that master chess players don't "think", they just "pattern
match".  Not only should selection pressures be consistently high, but
variability must also be consistently high. But I also want to
consider changes enacted *on* the system.  The real "orthogonality
condition" here would say: evolutionary change is faster when
throughput between the evolutionary agent (species, learner) and the
system (antagonist, environment) is richer.  So, the more
intelligible/palpable and, especially, the more semantically
fine-grained the channel that communicates between agent and system,
the faster the agent can learn.

(In a way this is a corollary of the Red Queen Hypothesis, but one
would *study* it in a very different manner.)