[v-erne]

I was brought up with this distinction - my family always put more pressure on understanding than remebering but now after mamy years I start to suspect that there is really no difference between those two - understanding is probably just remembering proper models that are useful to solve problems that You want know how to solve.

[laszlokorte]

remembering vs understanding is uncompressed vs compressed storage:

If I tell you a sequence of numbers: 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128

And you try to remember them, having never seen these numbers before, you have to remember each individually and it will not be so easy.

But if you, before trying to remember them, apply a little computing power to figure out that its a sequence of powers of two, starting from 2^0 going up to 2^7, then you have compressed the information I gave you. You understood (presumely) the source of the information and you will be able to remember the numbers much easier.

One strategy I see people applying to unknown data they want to remember is to try to establish links to already known information or made up stories. For example when given the sequence of numbers above but not knowing about exponentials some people would try the follwing:

  * 1: the first number is one (as on the number line)
  * 2: the second number is two (same)
  * 4: I have four friends
  * 8: I ate lunch with my friends
  * 16: my sister was also there, she is 16 years old
  * 32: the house number of the restaurant was 32
  * 64: we ate sushi, my dad also likes sushi, he is 64 years old
  * 128: one-two-eight sounds a bit like "want to eat" and yeah I also like to eat

By doing so some people seem to achieve quit good memory of an unknown topic. But from my point of view they are only re-encoding the information to sort it into already existing bins in their memory instead of compressing it. The amount of information is not reduced but increased and it seems harder to reconstruct the original encoding/information. Additional without compressing the numbers to their generating algorithm it is not possible to use the "learned" knowledge for anything but reciting.

This all leads to Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference.