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H. Simon was among the founders of artificial intelligence and a very important microeconomicist, and I have often thought that these disciplines are not fundam
by curuinor 11y ago
H. Simon was among the founders of artificial intelligence and a very important microeconomicist, and I have often thought that these disciplines are not fundamentally different. What problem does backpropagation solve? Credit assignment. What problem does the market solve? Credit assignment. How do they do it? Localization of computation.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI think it's more general than that. Both backpropagation and the market introduce a feedback loop. That's the source of the behaviour. You can see similar phenomena in other closed-loop systems. That's why I think control theory is one of the best things humans invented ;).
- curuinor 11y agoPositive feedback loop, specifically. Tesauro noted power-law times in BP learning and you can go off and look at highly skew distributions in BP weight assignments on your own. Simon had a little program of research on skew distributions in economics (you cannot throw a stone but you hit one: money, firm size, investments, trades, income, GDP, yadda yadda), and how they are best explained by positive feedback loops.