Several Years of Practice May Not Be As Good as Comprehensive Training: Zipf's Law Explains Why

Authors

Francisco Zapata, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Olga Kosheleva, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow

Publication Date

2-2020

Comments

Technical Report: UTEP-CS-20-05

Abstract

Many professions practice certifications as a way to establish that a person practicing this profession has reached a certain skills level. At first glance, it may sound like several years of practice should help a person pass the corresponding certification test, but in reality, even after several years of practice, most people are not able to pass the test, while after a few weeks of intensive training, most people pass it successfully. This sounds counterintuitive, since the overall number of problems that a person solves during several years of practice is much larger than the number of problems solved during a few weeks of intensive training. In this paper, we show that Zipf's law explains this seemingly counterintuitive phenomenon.