Wednesday, September 05, 2012
Brought about by change
I just identified the background music in NLB when they announce "Dear readers, the library will be closing in 15 mins, …) it's moonlight sonata!
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Today, when I received some change from a waitress, I was reminded of this story by my primary school teacher: there was once a student who didn't really know etiquette. So everyday, when the student submitted a notebook containing his homework to his teacher, the teacher would toss it aside and walk away without any explanation. This made the student frustrated yet puzzled. Every day he would greet the teacher, or say something nice before submitting his homework, but the teacher did the same thing: toss it aside, and walk away. It was only one day when he finally, by chance, decided to try handing in his homework with both hands that the teacher finally accepted it. So, according to my teacher, the moral of the story is: it's more polite to hand things over with both hands.
But the obvious thing in the mind of the student would be: Why doesn't the teacher just tell me what I'm doing wrong? Perhaps, the student could also have watched how other students were handing in their homework to try to figure out what he was doing wrongly. That reminds me of an article about reinforcement learning vs imitation vs instruction. The article found reinforcement learning to be less effective than both imitation and instruction for a certain task. It makes me wonder: if machines become conscious, would they get frustrated when we try to train them to do something by reinforcement learning? Would they think, "Yeh right, as if you know how to do it!" or "Why don't you just tell me what you want and not make me do this over and over again?"
But I guess there will always be some amount of reinforcement learning to be done as long as there are unsolved problems - some people need to stay at the forefront to do less inefficient learning task of discovering new methods, while others can help to spread the knowledge in a more efficient way by making more people aware of the method, or by teaching it well. Perhaps the moral of the story is that Nature is kinda like that annoying teacher in that story, and we as students should help to make each others' lives a bit easier.
Comments by IntenseDebate
Posting anonymously.
Brought about by change
2012-09-05T22:17:00+08:00
Yak
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