By R. Alexander Bentley
Publication Date: 2026-02-26 14:24:00
In graduate school, my experimental archeology professor told a student to make a doorway—the hole in a door frame into which a latch slides—in a slab of sandstone by picking at it with a rounded stone. After a few weeks, the student presented his results to the class. “I picked at the sandstone about 10,000 times,” he said, “and then it broke.”
This type of experience is called individual learning. It works through trial and error, with a lot of it. Also known as reinforcement learning, it is the way children, chimpanzees, crows and AI often learn to do something on their own, such as making a simple tool or solving a puzzle.
But individual learning has limits. No matter how much someone experiments through trial and error, there will come a time when improvement will reach its limits. Humans have been throwing spears for several hundred thousand years, but performance has largely declined. At the 2024 Paris Olympics, the javelin throw gold medal was about 5% behind Jan…
