Gradient Descent and Chain-Linked Systems

On Broken Incentives and Deadlock.

By Shawn Jain and Blake Elias
[Shawn Jain is an AI Resident at Microsoft Research.
Blake Elias is a Researcher at the New England Complex Systems Institute.]

Origins

Several years ago, Blake read “Good Strategy / Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters”, a book on business and management strategy. Chapter 8, “Chain-Link Systems”, describes situations in which a system’s performance is limited by its weakest…