Abstract
How can systems — both natural and artificial — improve their own performance? At least for natural systems (people, for example), we know that practice is effective. A system is engaged in practice when it repeatedly performs one, or a set of similar, tasks. Recently, Newell and Rosenbloom (1981) brought together the evidence that there is a ubiquitous law — the power law of practice — that characterizes the improvements in human performance during practice. The law states that when human performance is measured in terms of the time to perform a task, it improves as a power-law function of the number of times the task has been performed (called the trial number). This result holds over the entire domain of human performance, including both purely perceptual tasks, such as target detection (Neisser, Novick, & Lazar, 1963), and purely cognitive tasks, such as supplying justifications for geometric proofs (Neves & Anderson, 1981) or playing a game of solitaire (Newell & Rosenbloom, 1981).
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