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Teaching a smarter learner


Author(s) : H. David Mathias Sally A. Goldman, 
Publisher : N/A
Publication Date : 1996
ISSN : N/A
Abstract : We introduce a formal model of teaching in which the teacher is tailored to a particular learner, yet the teaching protocol is designed so that no collusion is possible. Not surprisingly, such a model remedies the non-intuitive aspects of other models in which the teacher must successfully teach any consistent learner. We prove that any class that can be exactly identified by a deterministic polynomial-time algorithm with access to a very rich set of example-based queries is teachable by a computationally unbounded teacher and a polynomialtime learner. In addition, we present other general results relating this model of teaching to various previous results. We also consider the problem of designing teacher/learner pairs in which both the teacher and learner are polynomial-time algorithms and describe teacher/learner pairs for the classes of 1-decision lists and Horn sentences. 1,