Nature-Inspired Learning 🌳
Nature-Inspired Computing
All organisms are continuously learning throughout their lifespans.
In this blog, I am trying to understand the learning process and how I can learn something by observing nature around me.
In this era, how we learn is more important than what we learn.
How - The process of understanding the context, finding the patterns, and the ability to apply the solution learned to future problems.
What - domain of interest makes you motivated to learn further
Learning is made easier with LLM's. Vast history of knowledge summarized in a single prompt.
Stages of Learning :
Unconscious Incompetence - You don't even know the gap exists.
Conscious Incompetence - You see the gap. Now learning can begin.
Conscious Competence - You can do it with effort and focus.
Unconscious Competence - You do it without thinking. It is part of you.
We need to identify what we don't know first. If we don't know what we don't know, then we never know that.
Read more https://fsw.pressbooks.pub/sls1515/chapter/the-learning-process/
Where are we now?
If we try to visualize our existence in this universe in proportion to a one-year timeline, we are just here for the last 35 minutes, and software exists for less than 1 second.
Nature solved various complex problems over billions of years and is still solving; however, we have discovered only a few of them.
Solving our complex problems by identifying natural patterns will open up a new way of thinking and fundamental base to the solution.
As the solution is backed by nature, it is a time-tested solution for millions of years, and it obeys the fundamental laws by default.
I feel Nature 🌳 is mighty and vast...
To transfer nature's behavior to other domain, we need a process called pattern identification.
Example:
How do ants find the shortest path to the food?
What is the problem here solved - Finding the shortest path
https://medium.com/@hasnain.roopawalla/ant-colony-optimization-1bbc346c2da5
Finding the path is a bigger problem that kingdoms tried to solve, as did militaries, logistics companies, and the day-to-day app Google Maps, but ants solved this a million years ago.
Pattern Language:
Patterns - a regularity or a sequence that repeats in a predictable and logical manner.
Patterns play a key role in identifying similar problems and applying the skills that we learned in the past in the same or a different domain. Without identifying the patterns, the skills learned will never be used.
Meta Cognitive Vision:
It is something like an aerial view from the drone shots, where we have an overall view of the environment, so we can find the roads connecting two places, or pave a new way connecting both.
Having the context of two domains enables us to see similar patterns of problems and try one's solution on the other.
Ways to find the patterns and apply ?
Feel the nature, find the patterns, and apply them in other domains. - Applying the patterns
Find the domain problem and just ask these questions: If I am nature, how would I solve this? Has nature already solved this? - Finding the patterns
2-way is the usual approach for the general population, as nature is vast; understanding everything is impossible.
Now what am I trying to do?
Learning with nature:
Finding the patterns, solving the problems can be long term goal .
But as a first step, I am trying to change my learning methodology to nature-inspired learning, learning DSA, design patterns, or LLMS, which are all already discovered. I am trying to find their patterns in nature and a deep analysis and reason for their existence.
When we are learning with nature's pattern, we will be feeling the problem in raw form, it is more like experiencing the problem, so it never fades.
I am planning to write it in a series, each pattern in one blog...
| Algorithm | Nature Pattern |
|---|---|
| Tree | Your lungs never plan how to reach every cell. They just branch — one airway splitting into two, then two into four, until every corner is touched. Every database index does the same. |
| Dijkstra | Water never plans the fastest route downhill. It just follows the lowest point available. No map. Always optimal. We formalised this in 1956. Nature had been running it for billions of years. |
| Recursion | Every arm of a snowflake is a smaller snowflake. Same rule. Smaller scale. Forever. |
| Dynamic Programming | Evolution never restarts from scratch. Every generation builds on the last. Never recompute what already survived. |
| ANN | No single neuron in your brain is intelligent. Intelligence lives between them — in 86 billion connections firing together. We stopped trying to program intelligence. We copied the structure instead. |
Creating the problems?
Once we learned the pattern, the best way to evaluate the skill is to create a new problem using that pattern rather than solving decade-old problems.
If we create a problem, we are forced to learn the constraints and application of that pattern.
Finally,
Beyond software,
Everyone's life is an enhanced pattern of our ancestors,
Birth → Live(Varies) → Die
Chase the patterns; solutions will chase you!
https://uxmag.com/articles/a-pattern-language