Loss landscapes and the blessing of dimensionality

"Life requires Movement" -- (Aristotle, 4th century BC) The more life there is, the more flexibility there is. The more fluid you are, the more you are alive." "Life is movement, movement is change" -- beginning of a quote by Neale Donald Walsch "If life boils down to one thing, it's movement. To live is to keep moving" -- Jerry Seinfeld As many well known people have told us throughout history, life is movement. Life is changing your state in a proactive way, going from A to B. Life is also an expensive process and that makes the process of going from A to B a delicate, fascinating process that needs to be optimized. And that's where we begin this article. And although we will focus throughout the following sections on deep learning and A.I, we will be touching simultaneously on universal themes and principles that go to the core of what means being alive. In a process that depends on a very large number of parameters, which makes it multidimensional. Which makes it hard to visualize for beings that operate in only 3 dimensions (4 with time). Which is the whole point of this article. So let's begin this ride where it all begins, with movement. Say we want to go from A to B in regards to some objective. Some of these challenges will take minutes, other hours, others days and some of them years. Some of them depend on a moderate number of factors, others depend on a massive number of them. We want to optimize these and infinite other challenges and the objective is always going from A to B. You may also combine many challenges and see life itself as a massive fractal made of optimization processes at different scales. Going from A to B could be tackled in different ways. We could do it very systematically, trying lots of possibilities. Or we could try to find the most efficient way to get there as soon as possible.