Implications of no-free-lunch theorems

In the 18th century, the philosopher David Hume observed that induction—inferring the future based on what's happened in the past—can never be reliable. In 1997, SFI Professor David Wolpert with his colleague Bill Macready made Hume's observation mathematically precise, showing that it's impossible for any inference algorithm (such as machine learning or genetic algorithms) to be consistently better than any other for every possible real-world situation.

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