alt Hacker NewsYea, that's what I was trying to get at. It is not deterministic because the interpretation is the point. It is how the learner integrates the material. If you don't interpret, then you're not learning, you're just memorizing.
A teacher should therefore embrace the fuzzy nature of explaining concepts.
With humans it is a mix of both. Learning just the algorithm is hard, you need some amount of initial data to conceptualize, and this amount of data can vary pretty greatly between people.