Finally, the myth of a village can also be understood as "training data" (as in neural networks and artificial intelligence).

In computer science, neural networks and other artificial intelligence systems are "trained" by presenting to them a large set of [scenario, action, outcome] triplets. What makes the software "intelligent" is that it "remembers" these patterns so as to become able to choose an optimal action when presented with a new scenario that resembles the scenarios that it "saw" during training. On this view, the myth of a village serves primarily to "train" children so that when they are adults, they will respond optimally to whatever scenarios are presented within the village, as well as to scenarios presented to the village by the jungle.