Monday, February 27, 2006

The Reward Hypothesis

In general, I think the core idea that makes biological brains understandable is rewards. The following "Reward Hypothesis," as described on the RLAI research group's site (http://rlai.cs.ualberta.ca/RLAI/rewardhypothesis.html), summarizes my point:

"That all of what we mean by goals and purposes can be well thought of as maximization of the expected value of the cumulative sum of a received scalar signal (reward)."

I think this is a clear description what the brain is "trying to do." All other major brain functions make the task of reward maximization easier.

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