The "best" way to do learning

[Tony Y. T. Chan]

It is obvious that as David Wolpert said, ``There is no such thing as
an a priori "best method" to do *anything* in machine learning.''  But
I would like to raise the following question: Is there such a thing as
the best method to learn a random idea?  More precisely, given n
random (machine) learning problems, is there such a thing as the best
method for dealing with these problems that will give the best overall
performance.  There may be some best methods for dealing with some
specific types of learning problems but is there one that would deal
with any learning problem and give the best overall performance?

Tony Chan