Critics like Minsky, Chomsky, and Fodor once had the upper hand, but thankfully their influence has waned. Nevertheless, we should keep their criticisms in mind as we set out on the road to the Master Algorithm for two reasons. The first is that knowledge engineers faced many of the same problems machine learners do, and even if they didn’t succeed, they learned many valuable lessons. The second is that learning and knowledge are intertwined in surprisingly subtle ways, as we’ll soon find out. Unfortunately, the two camps often talk past each other. They speak different languages: machine
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