Vulture comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong

25 Post author: orthonormal 26 December 2011 10:57PM

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Comment author: Vulture 25 April 2012 04:16:56AM 2 points [-]

By my understanding, learning is basically when a program collects the data it uses itself through interaction with some external system. Self-modification, on the other hand, is when the program has direct read/write acces to its own source code, so it can modify its own decision-making algorithm directly, not just the data set its algorithm uses.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 25 April 2012 04:48:00AM 1 point [-]

This seems to presume a crisp distinction between code and data, yes?
That distinction is not always so crisp. Code fragments can serve as data, for example.
But, sure, it's reasonable to say a system is learning but not self-modifying if the system does preserve such a crisp distinction and its code hasn't changed.