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concepts → Theorem

Theorem

No free lunch

timeless0 connections

averaged over all problems, no learner beats any other — so assumptions are everything

Where it sits

The prism has six jobs across and eight layers down. Its primary cell islearn × L0. Hatched cells cannot exist — a GPU does not learn, an institution does not infer.

What must come first — and what it unlocks

Left to right is reading order, derived from the prerequisite_of edges. Nothing here is hand-ordered: the diagram is the graph.

nothing comes first — this is a starting pointNo free lunchnothing depends on it yet — a leaf in the reading order

Where to read it

The chapter that introduces it, and any chapter that uses it again.

12No Free Lunchact 2 · The Instruments

Where it comes from

paperScaling Laws for Neural Language ModelsJared Kaplan, et al. · 2020

Every connection

All 0 edges touching this node, grouped by relation family — the sections above are highlights from this list. Colours match the relation families inthe atlas.

This page is a projection of one node in src/data/concepts.ts. It has no prose file of its own — 230 declared edges produce all 236 of these pages. Edit an edge and both endpoints change.