Sorry just seeing this now. By indirection I just meant taking a longer path than the direct shortest path. This could be seen as being in a local minima and by climbing that hill so arrive at a lower more stable even lower minima.
The monomyth isn't best concetualized as a perfect circular cycle but as a 3D upward spiral. That is because it is considered to be progressive. As the T S Eliott quote goes "...Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time."
My point is that this spiral isnt always upward as it cycles. It also has to go downward (degeneration) in order to go upward. Mythologically speaking this is the descent into hell or facing your fears.
We understand this in our everyday life in that we hardly ever approach goals directly. Think of how people endure the suffering of exercise so they can minimize suffering/death later in life (well there is more than one reason for exercise).
In fact another way of seeing it is through finance. We save and invest rather than spend because of the present/future value trade-offs.
Think of a maze for an AI, where you know the coordinates of the goal ahead of time. Do you assume that the navigation will be the shortest path and never move in a way that increases your distance from the goal? There will likely be instances like this.
The annealing examples if I remeber correctly have to do with the notion of getting to a lower more stable energy state by going up first (climbing a hill).
The monomyth isn't best concetualized as a perfect circular cycle but as a 3D upward spiral. That is because it is considered to be progressive. As the T S Eliott quote goes "...Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time."
My point is that this spiral isnt always upward as it cycles. It also has to go downward (degeneration) in order to go upward. Mythologically speaking this is the descent into hell or facing your fears.
We understand this in our everyday life in that we hardly ever approach goals directly. Think of how people endure the suffering of exercise so they can minimize suffering/death later in life (well there is more than one reason for exercise).
In fact another way of seeing it is through finance. We save and invest rather than spend because of the present/future value trade-offs.
Think of a maze for an AI, where you know the coordinates of the goal ahead of time. Do you assume that the navigation will be the shortest path and never move in a way that increases your distance from the goal? There will likely be instances like this.
The annealing examples if I remeber correctly have to do with the notion of getting to a lower more stable energy state by going up first (climbing a hill).