Seems like the planning process or algorithm is recursive but the plans are merely hierarchical.
Speaking or recursion in human cognition, I’ve always wondered if it is implemented in the human brain in what computer scientists (programming language compiler writers, to be specific) call “unrolling” as opposed to true recursion. Many modern compilers, when they detect that a recursive algorithm or simple loop will actually only nest 5 times, say, will generate machine code that unrolls the recursion into a simple linear series of 5 steps. The brain really can’t handle very many levels of recursion so this may be why. it implements what abstractly requires recursion as a linear sequence, turning the recursion level into a simple sequence index. Nature never (or hardly ever) implements true recursion as it always stops after a few levels.
Seems like the planning process or algorithm is recursive but the plans are merely hierarchical.
Speaking or recursion in human cognition, I’ve always wondered if it is implemented in the human brain in what computer scientists (programming language compiler writers, to be specific) call “unrolling” as opposed to true recursion. Many modern compilers, when they detect that a recursive algorithm or simple loop will actually only nest 5 times, say, will generate machine code that unrolls the recursion into a simple linear series of 5 steps. The brain really can’t handle very many levels of recursion so this may be why. it implements what abstractly requires recursion as a linear sequence, turning the recursion level into a simple sequence index. Nature never (or hardly ever) implements true recursion as it always stops after a few levels.
Do you have a source for these? (a book on neuroscience, a picture of simple animal brains, etc.)
This is at least true in feed-forward neural nets