Page 186 - Deep Learning

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The Growth of Competence

Skilled activity is a programme specifying an objective or terminal state to be
achieved, and requiring the serial ordering of a set of constituent, modular
subroutines.
Jerome S. Bruner 1

From [the] naturalistic viewpoint, it will be possible to show that there are eight
kinds of learning, not just one or two.
Robert M. Gagné 2

on March 18, 1965, the Soviet astronaut Alexei Leonov exited from the airlock
on the Voskhod 2 space shuttle and floated in orbit above the Earth for 20 min-
utes. This was the first space walk and the endpoint of a process that started
3
approximately 200,000 years ago, when members of Homo sapiens migrated
4
out of Africa and into what we now call the Fertile Crescent. The move out
of Africa was the beginning of the colonization of Earth by humans. By the
middle of the 20th century, the ocean depths and outer space were the only
habitats as yet uninhabited.
in the course of this giant dispersal, human beings colonized environ-
ments so different from one another that they might as well have been on dif-
ferent planets. South of the Fertile Crescent lies what we now call the Arabian
peninsula, sand dune upon sand dune promising nothing but dehydration and
heat stroke between here and the horizon. Yet the ancestors of the Arabs lived
successfully there, figuring out how to tame the bad-tempered camel, protect
themselves against the sun with layers of cloth and locate what little water there
was. At the opposite end of the Earth, ecologically speaking, the ancestors of the
polynesians learned to build oceangoing sailing vessels – misleadingly called
“canoes” in popular accounts – which eventually took them thousands of kilo-
meters across the open waters of the pacific to Aotearoa, the place Westerners

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