Hero vs Non-Hero: How ML/AI is different

One difference in the nature of Hero methods vs non-Hero methods, is the level of understanding of the problem world and data. Non-Hero development is mature; one can relatively easily write and build to a set of requirements, with much of the difficulty arising from the process and human side of things. Hero development includes this and one additional challenge -- the world and data may be unknown, invisible and always changing. This makes it hard to build to a set of requirements as we may not know what to require until we actually perform some modelling. Sometimes, we may be able to "write requirements" since the objective of the experiment is to make and validate hypotheses about the space.