NEW DELHI: Artificial intelligence (AI) too could be capable of ' learning by thinking ', which is known to be core to a great discovery, according to a review. Cognitive scientists have documented how people learn from observation, in which one acquires knowledge by observing the external world. However, another way of learning -- a relatively neglected one -- is 'learning by thinking', in which one gains knowledge without input from the external world, such as through thought experiments or self-explanations, according to Tania Lombrozo , a professor of psychology at the Princeton University and the author of the review published in the journal 'Trends in Cognitive Sciences'.
In a thought experiment, one hypothetically explores a theory or a principle by thinking through its consequences, whereas in learning through self-explanations, one makes a sense of new information by relating it with what they already know. Albert Einstein and Galileo Galilei are known to have used thought experiments for coming up with the theory of relativity and insights about gravity, respectively. Lombrozo's review showed that this process of thinking may not be exclusive to humans and that AI too is capable of correcting itself and arriving at new conclusions through 'learning by thinking'.
"There are some recent demonstrations of what looks like learning by thinking in AI, particularly in large language models ," Lombrozo said. In the review, Lambrozo said, when asked to elaborate on a complex.