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Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.

COMPLEXITY

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Explore v.s. Exploit: Finding Solutions Quickly Can Get You Stuck in a Local Optimum

The explore, exploit trade-off in computer science highlights the challenge of simultaneously optimizing for effectively doing things (exploit) and search through all the possibilities (explore). When trying to find new solutions, one can either search for solutions similar to the ones already known, making small changes to accommodate new evidence quickly, or consider the possibility of a much better solution that is further away in a high dimensional space. While the former allows for quickly finding a pretty good solution, the latter may lead to finding a much better solution, albeit in a space too large to search systematically.

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