No Free Lunch (NFL)

My friend Indranil introduced me to the theory of “No Free Lunch”.  From Wikipedia article:

A conventional, but not entirely accurate, interpretation of the NFL results is that “a general-purpose universal optimization strategy is theoretically impossible, and the only way one strategy can outperform another is if it is specialized to the specific problem under consideration”

 

It is definitely something that I must keep in mind whenever doing research.

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