And then again, they did something like this; the opening scene where everyone is randomly killing each other in an arena, day after day until one remains, and that one is the ninja...

This very brutal and unrealistic process is exactly how servitor creation with Astra would look if dramatized. The secret to it is that there is no trick at all, it's just mashing all test data into an arena and letting simulations fight until the most effective algorithm is left standing, with no conscious plan or order to the process at all aside from this.

This was also what I realized and how I solved the shield problem, it doesn't have to be logical, you don't need to understand the data, just test it vs reality until it works. The enlightenment coming from this is the same as why things in nature look like they do. Intelligent design is to take these worn down design elements and add them in a way you like. Throwing everything into a pot will result in a jellyfish, there is no design in that form. If it's more than that, some form of intelligence took part in the shaping of the being.

It's the difference between two AI search methods, there is the monitored search where labels were already put on the data and new information is matched to the old to varying degrees. And there is the unmonitored search which only collects data blindly and illustrates it as a graph. Both can be used at once, but when labels are put in, that is intelligent design. There is no saying that labels or structuring would exist if there was no goal for the design.

The process described in Under Ninja starts with bare handed fighting, then moves to wooden swords, then real swords. This will select for those who do better with this training procedure. Maybe someone else would have won if the tools given were gauntlets or flails. So this is the intelligence of this design. It's part of the already prepared DNA which is added to the pot, which leads to certain results. It is the perspective of the researcher, and the reason why it can't be "objective". If it was objective, it would not have a label telling you it is research.