✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Exploration and exploitation | benkuhn.net

benkuhn.net · 898 words · saved by 1 readers

I love it when I get to use computer-science metaphors to illuminate real-life processes. One of my favorite such metaphors was introduced to me by my algorithms professor last year. I was meeting with him to get his thoughts on what classes I should take. His suggestion was to frame it as an exploration-exploitation trade-off, a concept that comes from a technique for solving difficult optimization problems. It turns out to be a powerful and helpful way to view things. Suppose, for example, that you’re trying to design an airplane wing and you want it to be as aerodynamic as possible. How would you do this? You could try and calculate the optimal wing shape directly, but there are lots of variables that affect the aerodynamics, and they interact in complicated ways, so that’s probably too hard. It turns out the best solution is the obvious one: try a bunch of different designs and pick the one that turns out to work the best. The hard part is generating the designs to test in the firs

I love it when I get to use computer-science metaphors to illuminate real-life processes. One of my favorite such metaphors was introduced to me by my algorithms professor last year. I was meeting with him to get his thoughts on what classes I should take. His suggestion was to frame it as an exploration-exploitation trade-off , a concept that comes from a technique for solving difficult optimization problems. It turns out to be a powerful and helpful way to view things. Suppose, for example, that you're trying to design an airplane wing and you want it to be as aerodynamic as possible. How wo

Explore this link on the map →

related reading