The 1984 martial arts classic, The Karate Kid, has the David vs Goliath story line that we all love. Here’s a summary for those of you that haven’t seen the movie:
Newly arrived in California from New Jersey, teenager Daniel almost immediately runs into trouble with the karate-trained high school bullies. He is rescued by a Japanese janitor, Miyagi, who agrees to teach Daniel how to harness karate for good instead of brutality. The film culminates in a championship karate bout, pitting Daniel against his sworn enemy Johnny - the cruel and thuggish boyfriend of Ali, with whom Daniel has fallen in love (and vice versa).
As cliched plots go, you can easily imagine who would’ve emerged victorious.
But unlike most movies with relentless, talented underdogs, The Karate Kid shows the evolution of Daniel from a nobody. For several days, master Miyagi makes him go through menial tasks like polishing the car, his floor, or painting the fence without talking about Karate.
On confronting him about unpaid labour, Miyagi demonstrates how the cleaning / waxing motions were similar to the moves in Karate. The enlightened Daniel joins the famed league of the few cleaners who became Karate masters.
Genuinely though, Mr. Miyagi taught Daniel just one thing: mastery through repetition.
Repetition
Malcolm Gladwell, in his famous book Outliers, provides examples of people who made to the peak of their fields by practising for 10,000+ hours.
While the quantum of time itself might be questioned, I’m sure those people didn’t just show up & do nothing for all those hours. Several of them seem to have put in the repetitions required for their success.
For an instance, Basketball legend Kobe Bryant practiced jump shots everyday for 4+ hours after his regular conditioning workout for more than 2 hours. This was when he was at the top after winning several championships & MVP (most valuable player) awards!
Mastering through repetition isn’t restricted to just humans though. Artificial Intelligence (AI) also seems to get better through repetition.
The most recent breakthroughs in AI have been when researchers just fed the machines data from their previous attempts towards “learning by themselves” to achieve success. This technique is known as Reinforced Machine Learning, and this piece defines it well:
In reinforcement learning, an artificial intelligence faces a game-like situation. The computer employs trial and error to come up with a solution to the problem. To get the machine to do what the programmer wants, the artificial intelligence gets either rewards or penalties for the actions it performs. Its goal is to maximize the total reward.
Although the designer sets the reward policy–that is, the rules of the game–he gives the model no hints or suggestions for how to solve the game. It’s up to the model to figure out how to perform the task to maximize the reward, starting from totally random trials and finishing with sophisticated tactics and superhuman skills.
Reinforced Machine Learning has brought about phenomenal outcomes.
Just by telling the machine that whether it proceeding in the right direction (usually indicated by the score of the game / system,) the machine is able to reach superhuman levels of success through iterations.
AIs “trained” using this repetitive loops have beat the most talented individuals / teams in games like Go & Dota, which were earlier thought to be too complex, and outside the realm of machine intelligence.
Meaningful iterations
Hence, if the machines aren’t doing just rote repetitions, why should we?
I’m sure that the human who’ve achieved peaks in their respective fields use their repetitions as feedback loops for continuous improvement.
Kobe Bryant, for example, had a very clear goal at practice: 800 made jump shots everyday. He didn’t just shoot 800 times. He shot till he made 800 baskets! The time he spent doing it didn’t matter.
If we could be like Kobe, we should attempt meaningful iterations towards our goals. If done well, I’m sure we’ll achieve incredible results & maybe we could get even Bruce Lee afraid
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
Cheers,
Kalaikovan