Principle of least effort

The principle of least effort.—The principle of least action underlies all these rules, and it is of great service, and of wide application. P. L. M. Maupertius foreshadowed the idea in 1747 All natural changes take place in such a way that the existing state of things suffers the least possible change or, as W. D. Bancroft (1911) expressed it A system tends to change so as to minimize the effects of an external disturbing force. This has been called the principle of the... 

G. K. Zipf, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort, Addison-Wesley, Cambridge, 1949. 

In many ways, what we saw was a demonstration of Herron s (14) principle of least cognitive effort. In general, students will do the least amount of work they can get away with and still get the grade that they want. Amanda and her friends tried to understand and were unsuccessful. Once they realized that it did not matter, and started to adopt the attitude of looking for the path of least resistance, they tended to adopt these superficial strategies with even more vigor. 

The idea that laws of nature should satisfy a principle of simplicity goes back at least to the Greek philosophers [436], The anthropomorphic concept that the engineering skill of a supreme creator should result in rules of least effort or of most efficient use of resources leads directly to principles characterized by mathematical extrema. For example, Aristotle (De Caelo) concluded that planetary orbits must be perfect circles, because geometrical perfection is embodied in these curves ... of lines that return upon themselves the line which bounds the circle is the shortest. That movement is swiftest which follows the shortest line . Hero of Alexandria ( Catoptrics) proved perhaps the first scientific minimum principle, showing that the path of a reflected ray of light is shortest if the angles of incidence and reflection are equal. 

Because these are long term tests, long term postingestional factors are operating. Collier (2.) would say that if the rat is drinking for solute or calories it is more efficient to drink from the higher concentrations suggesting a "principle of least con-summatory effort."... 

Considerable effort has gone into solving the difficult problem of deconvolution and curve fitting to a theoretical decay that is often a sum of exponentials. Many methods have been examined (O Connor et al., 1979) methods of least squares, moments, Fourier transforms, Laplace transforms, phase-plane plot, modulating functions, and more recently maximum entropy. The most widely used method is based on nonlinear least squares. The basic principle of this method is to minimize a quantity that expresses the mismatch between data and fitted function. This quantity /2 is defined as the weighted sum of the squares of the deviations of the experimental response R(ti) from the calculated ones Rc(ti) ... 

A claim made in many spiritual writings, supported by some experiential data from various d-ASCs, is that, with effort, we can become more and more conscious of exactly what we are doing, whether we can become conscious of everything we are doing psychologically at a given moment is unknown. Thus it is unclear whether we can ever be in a position adequately to assess whether the law of least action applies to psychological phenomena. But it may be profitable to postulate that the fifth principle does apply and then proceed to look for mani festations. 

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