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by MarsAscendant
2714 days ago
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While I believe to understand the general idea behind the theory as applied to real life, I'm struggling with a few concepts. What are local minima, in relation to the real life? Are those the "places", mentally speaking, where one feels like they're failing? What, exactly, are saddle points in this context? |
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They are places where you're doing OK but can't seem to make progress to "better than OK" by moving a little away from them (e.g. for many steps away from that situation, things are getting worse -- you need to travel a lot to get out of the "pit" you're in).
Consider someone obese. They feel worse when doing exercize/diet (compared to e.g. munching a pizza), but the feelings they have are not the best they could have related to their weight situation -- they'd feel best if they could persevere and eventually feel fit/healthy.
Saddle points are those where you can't seem to make easy progress on one direction (one aspect, e.g. how you feel about your health) but you can on another (e.g. how much money you make).
It's a little more involved (because if you're obese you're always best to lose, whereas a function can try both increasing and decreasing values to get out of a local minimum) but that's the gist I think.