Science, being a human activity, is not immune to fashion.【F1】For example, one of the first mathematicians to study the subject

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问题     Science, being a human activity, is not immune to fashion.【F1】For example, one of the first mathematicians to study the subject of probability theory was an English clergyman called Thomas Bayes, who was born in 1702 and died in 1761. His ideas about the prediction of future events from one or two examples were popular for a while, and have never been fundamentally challenged.【F2】But they were eventually overwhelmed by those of the "frequentist" school, which developed the methods based on sampling from a large population that now dominate the field and are used to predict things as diverse as the outcomes of elections and preferences for chocolate bars.
    Recently, however, Bayes’s ideas have made a comeback among computer scientists trying to design software with human like intelligence. Bayesian reasoning now lies at the heart of leading internet search engines and automated "help wizards". That has prompted some psychologists to ask if the human brain itself might be a Bayesian-reasoning machine.【F3】They suggest that the Bayesian capacity to draw strong inferences from sparse data could be crucial to the way the mind perceives the world, plans actions, comprehends and learns language, reasons from correlation to causation, and even understands the goals and beliefs of other minds.
    【F4】These researchers have conducted laboratory experiments that convince them they are on the right track, but only recently have they begun to look at whether the brain copes with everyday judgments in the real world in a Bayesian manner. In research to be published later this year in Psychological Science , Thomas Griffiths of Brown University in Rhode Island and Joshua Tenenbaum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put the idea of a Bayesian brain to a quotidian test. They found that it passes with flying colours.
    The key to successful Bayesian reasoning is not in having an extensive, unbiased sample, which is the eternal worry of frequentists, but rather in having an appropriate "prior", as it is known to the cognoscenti.【F5】This prior is an assumption about the way the world works—in essence, a hypothesis about reality—that can be expressed as a mathematical probability distribution of the frequency with which events of a particular magnitude happen.
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答案这个前提是对世界运行方式所做的假没,实质上是对真实事物的假设。这个假设是用大数量事件发生频率的数学概率分布表达出来的。

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