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by simsla 1771 days ago
The problem with this (very popular) argument is that you can't give a CS course to a baby and expect them to get at programming.

By the time we see our first line of code, most of us have seen a ridiculous amount of data. We've been trained in problem solving, logical reasoning, maths, natural language processing, ... Hell, we've been trained as pattern matchers since we've been born.

By my account, humans actually need a large amount of training data. It might be the knowledge federation and generalisation that we're good at, but I don't think we're a clear winner in data efficiency.

1 comments

Taking 11Mbps [1] as the raw uncompressed incoming data, and assuming 16 hours of waking environment consumption on average (likely high for children), a 13yo has taken in less than 400 TB of information (I used 11 * 60 * 60 * 16 * 365 * 13 / 8.) That's... surprisingly low.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/science/information-theory/Physio...

Are we still limiting to visual cues and not the auditory,smell,taste,touch data which we get exposed to?
Visual input is so dense it's basically not worth tracking the other senses from a data rate pov.