samba - Jan 2002 - Somewhat Off-Topic Psychology lesson (WAS: Re: Help I'm new)

>On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Joel Hammer wrote:
>
>> Isn't it great when things work? Intermittent reinforcement. I
think
>> that is how they train pigeons and white mice.
> Joel
>
> On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 05:04:51PM -0800, Cheryl Pelletier wrote:
> > Thanks again Joel Changing the guest account to root really opened up
the
> > server. But it's no problem sence it's only for home... thanks
> > again...........Daryl
You know, it's well known that you can train a rat to press a lever by
giving it
a food pellet every time it does it.  Eventually, if you stop rewarding the rat 
with the food, it'll still sit there banging on the lever all day.

Now, after a long enough period of not being rewarded for pressing the lever, 
the rat will give up and return to a more "normal" behaviour for a
rat, but
it'll still press the lever every so often just in case (more so than a rat
that
hadn't been trained).

With training by intermittent reinforcement, you get the rat to keep pressing 
the lever unrewarded for a much longer period of time because it's always 
expecting that the next press will pay off.  Very much similar to the people who
end up declaring bankruptcy because they couldn't resist sitting down in
front
of a slot machine.

What's more interesting is that during training, if you give the rat an
electric
shock via the floor of the cage in addition to giving it food, when you stop 
rewarding it, the rat will still sit there pressing the lever getting shocked.  
Depending on how obsessed the training program has made the rat and the 
intensity of the shock, it's entirely possible to end up with a very fried
rat.

I'm thinking Daryl's setting himself up to be Samba-user flambee'.