Definition: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
Input: Language learning is thought to be a highly complex process. One of the hurdles in learning a language is to learn the rules of syntax of the language. Rules of syntax are often ordered in that before one rule can applied one must apply another. It has been thought that to learn the order of n rules one must go through all n! permutations. Thus to learn the order of 27 rules would require 27! steps or 1.08889x10 steps. This number is much greater than the number of seconds since the beginning of the universe! In an insightful analysis the linguist Block ([Block 86], pp. 62-63, p.238) showed that with the assumption of transitivity this vast number of learning steps reduces to a mere 377 steps. We present a mathematical analysis of the complexity of Block’s algorithm. The algorithm has a complexity of order n given n rules. In addition, we improve Block’s results exponentially, by introducing an algorithm that has complexity of order less than n log n.

On the complexity of learning a language: An improvement of Block’s algorithm