Continuous vs. Batch learning

[Scott_Fahlman@SEF-PMAX.SLISP.CS.CMU.EDU]

    It is pretty clear to me that biological neural networks have all adapted
    to prefer the continuous learning technique...
    
    Anyway, perhaps we should take an example from nature, which has been
    optimizing things far longer than we have!
    
Sure, but with a totally different technology.  Give me 10^9 processors,
10^13 active, complex connections, and 3-D packing, and make short-term
memory scarce, slow, and unreliable, and I'd pick continuous learning as
well.  And it wouldn't even take me a billion years to make the decision.

-- Scott Fahlman