Rylan Schaeffer

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8 August 2021

Growing knowledge culturally across generations to solve novel, complex tasks

by Tessler, Tsivids, Madeano, Harper and Tenenbaum (Arxiv 2021)

Research Questions

The authors want to understand how language enables the accumulation of knowledge across generations. The approach is specifically to compare learning curves between (a) multiple generations, where each generation receives two lives at a game and can pass their knowledge to the next generation via language, and (b) a single learner who can continually learn with the same total number of lives.

Experiment 1

Setup

As stated above, the idea is to compare individual players against a “multi-generational player” i.e. a sequence of players who pass written information to the next generation. This multi-generational players looks like:

Each individual player and “multi-generational player” (sometimes referred to as chains) play 10 games, which each require a different type of problem-solving:

Messages stay within a single lineage. There are 10 parallel chains, with 8 generations (a.k.a. participants) per chain. N=80 total participants.

Results

Comments

tags: cultural-learning - cultural-ratchet - natural-language-processing