just_a_pyro t1_iycedq0 wrote on November 30, 2022 at 10:29 AM

Imagine giving a monkey a piano to play randomly. Every time you like what it plays you give it a banana and every time you don't you slap it with a rolled newspaper. Do it for a year or two and you get a composer monkey to tour the world with and make money. That's machine learning just with a monkey instead of a computer simulating a brain.

You can’t define good music and can’t write a computer program to do it. Monkey doesn’t even know what music is, and would be totally lost if given a guitar instead. But the result works out.

VanillaWaffle_ t1_iychikl wrote on November 30, 2022 at 11:13 AM

that works with human too

steelbreado t1_iycltbz wrote on November 30, 2022 at 12:05 PM

Excellent

shompyblah t1_iyd6pzc wrote on November 30, 2022 at 3:08 PM

….but a computer doesn’t care if it’s rewarded or punished.

Liese1otte t1_iydcsvk wrote on November 30, 2022 at 3:49 PM

Correct!

However, this is just an analogy. In reality programmers simulate "reward" and "punishment" using different techniques that effectively result in the same thing happening. In neural networks, those are represented in weights in biases, for example.

just_a_pyro t1_iyd8i1z wrote on November 30, 2022 at 3:20 PM

It does, or maybe it simulates caring, that's the whole idea of machine learning, if it didn't care there would be no reason to change the original random playing to play better.