To Holland, evolution and learning seemed much more like—well, a game. In both cases, he thought, you have an agent playing against its environment, trying to win enough of what it needed to keep going. In evolution that payoff is literally survival, and a chance for the agent to pass its genes on to the next generation. In learning, the payoff is a reward of some kind, such as food, a pleasant sensation, or emotional fulfillment. But either way, the payoff (or lack of it) gives agents the feedback they need to improve their performance: if they're going to be "adaptive" at all, they somehow
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