Sunday, January 29, 2006
Trial and error....yeah that's a nice concept of human learning developed by psychologists of yore..all those decades ago, psychologists observed mice running around in cages..and declared that their mice learnt through the method of trial and error. Are we just the same as those mice? Do we run around all our lives and learn just through trial and error? We would like to think that as the "superior" species, we have "higher cognitive abilities", but really, what is it? How do we learn? Is it trial and error or something else? Thinking about it..
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3 comments:
this trial and error concept it interesting... it reminds of iterative optimization...you converge to the [b]right[/b] solution in some steps mimizing certain cost function.. then.. the [i]superiority[/i] of the method is determined by the convergance rate and of course, the numerical accuracy... likewise, even in trial and error, how many trials do we need to make and how small an error one can achieve, is what matters...i think!!!
I couldn't agree more with you. When we make an error or make a mistake, we always think, had I known this I would acted this way. It's easy to say now but given the circumstance, we did out best. Unfortunately, that turned out to an error. Yes, Life is full of trial and errors. How many times have we wished for a second chance?
But I think, in our lives, our errors cost us more than we imagine. That's when we learn. Something like neural networks where we learn depending on previous errors. Ofcourse we get better with time. But life if full of uncertainties, just like any random signal a neural network has to deal with. In such circumstance, we donot guarantee anything from the neural system, or from ourselves. We do our best, but there's no gaurantee that it will turn out ok. So, I guess its not black or white....its gray (there I go , talking colors again!)
Interesting...
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