Rich Sutton March 13, 2019

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson.pdf

We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run.

One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great. The two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning.

instead we should build in only the meta-methods that can nd and capture this arbitrary complexity

Essential to these methods is that they can nd good approximations, but the search for them should be by our methods, not by us