Hinton’s latest passion is deep learning, which we’ll meet later in this chapter. He was also involved in the development of backpropagation, an even better algorithm than Boltzmann machines for solving the credit-assignment problem that we’ll look at next. Boltzmann machines could solve the credit-assignment problem in principle, but in practice learning was very slow and painful, making this approach impractical for most applications. The next breakthrough involved getting rid of another oversimplification that dated all the way back to McCulloch and Pitts.
