Is it not fair to say, “The program learned from experience… - Richard Hamming

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Is it not fair to say, “The program learned from experience”? Your immediate objection is that there was a program telling the machine how to learn. But when you take a course in Euclidean geometry, is not the teacher putting a similar learning program into you? Poorly, to be sure, but is that not, in a real sense, what a course in geometry is all about? You enter the course and cannot do problems; the teacher puts into you a program and at the end of the course you can solve such problems. Think it over carefully. If you deny the machine learns from experience because you claim the program was told (by the human programmer) how to improve its performance, then is not the situation much the same with you, except you are born with a somewhat larger initial program compared to the machine when it leaves the manufacturer’s hands? Are you sure you are not merely “programmed” in life by what chance events happen to you?

Richard Hamming

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn · October 1, 1997 Verified in 1 source Sign up to see the complete provenance

English

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About Richard Hamming

Richard Wesley Hamming (February 11, 1915 – January 7, 1998) was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer science and telecommunications. He received the 1968 Turing Award "for his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes."

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Native Name: Richard Wesley Hamming

Alternative Names: Richard W. Hamming

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Richard Feynman George Pólya Marvin Minsky Shane Parrish Henri Poincaré

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The people at the bottom do not have the larger, global view, but at the top they do not have the local view of all the details, many of which can often be very important, so either extreme gets poor results.

This is a book about thinking. One cannot talk about thinking in the abstract, at least not usefully. But one can talk about thinking about digital filters, and by studying how great scientists thought about digital filters, one learns, however gradually, to think like a great scientist.

Probability and statistics are now so obviously necessary tools for understanding many diverse things that we must not ignore them even for the average student.

Is it not fair to say, “The program learned from experience”? Your immediate objection is that there was a program telling the machine how to learn. … - Richard Hamming

About Richard Hamming

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