3 ms·

I dont think many babies need to see thousands of examples of tanks before they understand what a tank is, and even then sometimes mysteriously classify horses

• cdoxsey 8y ago
  You've nailed. Language is a great examply where our intuition about how one learns is wildly incorrect. Babies are prewired to rapidly learn language, merely by hearing it around them. They do this regardless of the language, with teachers who have no idea what they're doing. It's an incredible process but because it happens so easily it leads us to think teaching a computer these things must not be all that hard. But we're not generic computing devices, and our linguistic developmental skills are innate and incredibly well adapted. We just can't see it so we take it for granted.
• techbio 8y ago
  They understand something simpler earlier: a name/word for something [a noun] is in the set ("manmade object", "animal", "neither of these"). Classifiers built on classifiers referring to classifiers that make them laugh or cry; new knowledge is not built on random initiation weights. It is based on physiological imperatives that start before any of us were born. More data, more generations, more generalization.
• stickfigure 8y ago
  A baby has 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion to 1 quadrillion synapses, so they have a rather large advantage (as of yet). That said, I'm not sure babies are as clever as you suggest. By the time they can verbalize "tank" they've had a vast amount of neural training. Try running this experiment with a 6-month-old; I'll bet on the program.