Experience coverage and computational accessibility [ftip-00NB]
Experience coverage and computational accessibility [ftip-00NB]
The starting asymmetry concerns available experience: the lineage's initial corpora, memories and recorded traces do not contain some relevant part of the contributor's development. Literal absence is only a weak condition. Another description, a simulation, a derivation or a different experience may make an equally useful capability affordable. The claim in § [ftip-00N8] is to derive a bound covering these substitutes.
Three kinds of access should be distinguished. A stored trace gives particular observations and actions. Interactive access lets a learner choose actions based on its current state and receive the corresponding responses. Access to an executable environment model permits simulations, subject to the cost and fidelity of that model. None is automatically identical to either other kind: a finite trace need not determine responses to untried actions, while an accurate model can sometimes replace direct experience. Declare what the baseline actually has.
If environmental responses reveal a hidden bit that fixes the target answer, an information bound may be possible, but it proves a different mechanism. For conceptual discovery, retain a common mathematical truth contract and ask how development reveals reusable ways to search, represent or reason. The baseline may already contain enough information to compute the answer in principle. The proposed gap concerns the resources required to find and acquire an effective method.
A compact description of the acquired structure need not imply a cheap route to it. Description length, execution cost after identification, and discovery cost are different quantities. Conversely, declaring the structure absent from all affordable computations would assume the desired conclusion. Its inaccessibility must follow from the concrete task family, the supplied endowment and the admitted operations. Tools and simulations are charged operations within that argument, not an additional process outside the comparison.