Lecture: Learning as the Source of Life's Phenomena

Leslie G. Valiant

Abstract:

The assertion that all aspects of living organisms are determined by some combination of learning during an individual life and evolution beforehand is close to tautologous. Recent work that unifies within a computational framework Darwinian evolution on the one hand with learning on the other, can be viewed as a unified approach to how life is determined. We shall present this viewpoint and summarize some of its broader implications.

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