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by discardorama 4016 days ago
But not in the same brain. Sure, evolution happened and picked the right parameters; but today's brain comes with the hyperparameters baked in (with some small amount of randomness). It is able to do all the things it can do without the luxury of parallel training and tuning.

For example: you don't need to show a baby a 1000 photos of mugs before it can tell what's a mug and what isn't. Just show it 1 example of a mug a couple of times, and from then on it's able to identify mugs and mug-like objects pretty reliably.
2 comments
modeless 4016 days ago
> [the brain] is able to do all the things it can do without the luxury of parallel training and tuning.

I beg to differ. Newborn babies can hardly do anything. Their brains are undergoing "parallel training and tuning" 24/7 starting even before they are born. Babies train themselves on thousands of hours of visual stimuli to gain the 3D object recognition capabilities to reliably identify objects such as mugs.

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discardorama 4015 days ago
Newborn babies can hardly do anything because their parameters have not been set; but their hyperparameters (things like, to use NN analogies: activation function, learning rate, etc.) are baked in.
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modeless 4015 days ago
Right. Evolution picked the hyperparameters, and experiential learning picks the parameters. (To first order; certainly there are some instinctual behaviors programmed by evolution and I wouldn't be surprised if some hyperparameters are influenced by experience as well.)
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rasz_pl 4016 days ago
One data point is perfectly fine for NN, it doesnt stop learning after first sample

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GhNXHCQGsM

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