Abstract Initially discussed are some of Alan Turing's wonderfully profound and influential ideas about mind and mechanism—including regarding their connection to the main topic of the present study, which is within the field of computability-theoretic learning theory. Herein is investigated the part of this field concerned with the algorithmic, trial-and-error inference of eventually correct programs for functions from their data points. As to the main content of this study: in prior papers, beginning with the seminal work by Freivalds et al. in 1995, the notion of intrinsic complexity is used to analyse the learning complexity of sets of functions in a Gold-style learning setting. Herein are pointed out some weaknesses of this notion. Offered is an alternative based on epitomizing sets of functions—sets that are learnable under a given learning criterion, but not under other criteria that are not at least as powerful. To capture the idea of epitomizing sets, new reducibility notions are given based on robust learning (closure of learning under certain sets of computable operators). Various degrees of epitomizing sets are characterized as the sets complete with respect to corresponding reducibility notions! These characterizations also provide an easy method for showing sets to be epitomizers, and they are then employed to prove several sets to be epitomizing. Furthermore, a scheme is provided to generate easily very strong epitomizers for a multitude of learning criteria. These strong epitomizers are the so-called self-learning sets, previously applied by Case & Kötzing in 2010. These strong epitomizers can be easily generated and employed in a myriad of settings to witness with certainty the strict separation in learning power between the criteria so epitomized and other not as powerful criteria!