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by 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.
1 comments
discardorama 4016 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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