Less is more: cognitive bias for adding not subtracting

In yesterday’s call we talked about a model of sub-symbolic processing for mimicking human memory, see:

 https://www.w3.org/Data/demos/chunks/memory/ <https://www.w3.org/Data/demos/chunks/memory/> 

There were several comments about trying more complex approaches, e.g. involving keeping track of all the times a memory is accessed rather than just the last, something I argued is biologically implausible, and that we don’t need to design in support for rolling back memories to an earlier point in time.

It there seemed like a happy surprise to see today’s “Nature Briefing” with a short video on “less is more: why our brains struggle to subtract”.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y32OpI2_LM <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y32OpI2_LM> 

My experience has been that when working on an engineering challenge, at first it gets more and more complex as you learn more about the problem and the associated constraints, but usually at some point this goes into reverse as your understanding improves, and you see ways to simplify things. The simplest solution to the given requirements is often the best solution.

What’s your experience?

Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
W3C Data Activity Lead & W3C champion for the Web of things