We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Thursday, July 31, 2014

Machine learning in the personal life ....

In Computer Science Machine learning is a field where based on past training set data algorithms self tune themselves to predict the future possibilities when similar conditions as already seen in the past arrive. Machine learning gets used at lot of places in the current Internet dominated world. For e.g. the ads that you see next to your Google search results are presented by monitoring your past search attempts and predicting what are the most relevant category of ads that you might want to see in future. There are many such examples. 

Common sense as we say in personal life is a lot related to Machine Learning kind of experience. However, machine learning works on some specific set of rules, unlike common sense which many times could be based on ambiguous statements which can not be correctly comprehended. That is one of the main reasons Computers / Robots are very good at doing highly specialized tasks but are very bad at common sense 
(or as we call it Artificial Intelligence) related tasks. 

Now coming back to the personal life. Interactions in social life in a new culture are many times based on machine learning kind of rules. We meet people. There are different phases our relationships with new people go through. We like some people while we dislike some. Those whom we like we continue to pursue, and as we move towards more intricate relationships where we start interacting more and more with these people, we start forming our own experiences, and patterns about how they behave, whether they really mean what they say and have the ability to stick to their words, or whether they say certain things just to please others always. An aware person tries to define patterns for these new relationships that are under development. 

Many times emotions skew the way people react, their needs to be in presence of other people, their communication ability etc. However, still one can form a pattern of what the category a person could be put into roughly. Over a certain period these patterns emerge very strongly and that is when we understand the true nature of a person, as we have gathered enough sample points to say with a certain level of confidence that this person is going to behave in this manner in future based on what I have seen him / her doing in the past in these different stages. 

Males and females show very typical and different patterns in this respect and on the basis of that one can really say they are different species altogether with different needs. 

What is attachment? An aware person is like the machine learning algorithm he knows what state he is in and what needs to be done to get to the next stage in trying to understand the other person and define the relation in the correct manner on the basis of what has been seen so far. An attached person is the one who is completely blind to the process of learning and is acting on the whims of his emotions without seeing the patterns. 

Why do westerners go through so many relationship break-ups and how can they handle so much emotional turmoil because in order to be in a sincere relation one has to trust the other person. In my opinion most of these relationships go through these machine learning kind of phases, where people are constantly trying to predict what the next stage would be based on past patterns. I think after a while the relations become an intricate machine learning kind of pattern matching thing, where people just do not care and move on if patterns do not match. Emotions run dry. 

A near perfect relation in this sense is then the perfect machine learning algorithm which can so finely predict the outcomes of people's emotions based on the already accumulated learning, and the trust that accompanies it. All other relations are like those imperfect machine learning algorithms which are flawed. 

Some random thoughts as I try to co-relate the Computer Science technology with the daily life ......

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