17 Jun 2024
What I learned from my first Darwin seminar.
The introduction to todayâs talk was about collective intelligence by ants. The keywords were probably âtandem learningâ which is essentially a learning style where one individual teaches another. In case of the paper just below, ants found better house to move from their original one just by collective intelligence without being told externally. This phenomenon can turn out either positively-feedback positive or positively-feedback negative. So, bad things can also proliferate.
| [Ant colonies outperform individuals when a sensory discrimination task is difficult but not when it is easy | PNAS](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1304917110) |
Todayâs speaker Wataru Toyokawa san then talked about multi-armed bandit problem which is essentially about whether-to-explore-or-exploit-problem. To maximise the payoff as a society, how do people collaborate, and he used slot machines at first to demonstrate which one gives more hits than others by utilising reinforcement learning. Then he extended that to much more complex system with the same principle. SO, I got lost.
A concept he mentioned was âhot stove effectâ, which is basically that when I touch a stove to feel so hot that I donât want to touch again, that lowers the expectation that the stove will do something good in the future, meaing that I tend to averse the risk then on.
He explained that in a context of social behaviour, which seemed to me applicable to interdisciplinary research strategy. But I have not been able to narrow down my research question.
When it comes to forming a research question, I was supposed to make workshop materials for Teikyo-TMU colab event lat weekend, which I have already procastinate for a few days. So this is now a good timing to teach myself as well as high school students how to do research based on my experience. Iâm reading two books and a paper and some academic websites about forming research questions. I hope to finish this by the end of today.
Having said that, I have got to watch youtube videos Adam W. posted for tomorrowâs lab class!!