Despite the popularity of decision trees, inverse deduction is the better starting point for the Master Algorithm. It has the crucial property that incorporating knowledge into it is easy—and we know Hume’s problem makes that essential. Also, sets of rules are an exponentially more compact way to represent most concepts than decision trees. Converting a decision tree to a set of rules is easy: each path from the root to a leaf becomes a rule, and there’s no blowup. On the other hand, in the worst case converting a set of rules into a decision tree requires converting each rule into a
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