Decision as Computation (IMAGE)
Caption
Optimal shopping in a grocery store in order to maximize the purchase utility for a given budget is an NP-hard problem. For only 100 different goods the combinatorial number of choices (configurations) is approximately 1030; for 1000 goods, 10301 - both intractable computations for the world's fastest computers. In practice, approximate solutions using heuristics have proven adequate for basic human nutritional needs given constraints of budget, time to shop, home storage for perishable items, and many other practical factors. These decisions still require allocation of mental resources of energy, thought, and memory - in short, the resources for any computation. In cancer survival decisions, the cancer is "shopping" in its store of thousands of survival mechanisms to combat and escape from low pH, inadequate O2, immune attack, or the oncologists' lethal interventions in order to grow, move or both. This computation also requires the cancer's e-machine to optimally allocate resources for an adequate solution to a similar NP-hard problem. (Reprinted from (145).
Credit
Bossaerts, et al 2017
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CCBY
License
Licensed content