created 2025-06-10, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025
rel: Favorite things
Otherwise known as the explore-exploit tradeoff, is a fundamental concept in decision-making.
It is depicted as the balancing act between two opposing strategies.
Exploitation involves choosing the best option based on current knowledge of the system (which may be incomplete or misleading), while exploration involves trying out new options that may lead to better outcomes in the future at the expense of an exploitation opportunity.
Too much exploration wastes opportunity to capitalize options you’ve found, and too much exploitation stops finding better alternatives.
I’m trying to relate this to No Free Lunch Theorem which states that averaged across all possible problem instances, no optimization algorithm performs better than any other. This means that any algorithm’s superior performance on some problems must be offset by inferior performance on others.
This is the no free lunch theorem in action: no algorithm can be universally better than any other when you consider all possible problems equally.