The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

by Pedro Domingos

Optimization plays a prominent role in almost every field of science, technology, and business, including machine learning. Each field optimizes within the constraints defined by optimizations in other fields. We try to maximize our happiness within economic constraints, which are firms’ best solutions within the constraints of the available technology—which in turn consists of the best solutions we could find within the constraints of biology and physics. Biology, in turn, is the result of optimization by evolution within the constraints of physics and chemistry, and the laws of physics themselves are solutions to optimization problems. Perhaps, then, everything that exists is the progressive solution of an overarching optimization problem, and the Master Algorithm follows from the statement of that problem.