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

by Pedro Domingos

The knowledge engineers were irritated by Rosenblatt’s claims and envious of all the attention and funding neural networks, and perceptrons in particular, were getting. One of them was Marvin Minsky, a former classmate of Rosenblatt’s at the Bronx High School of Science and by then the leader of the AI group at MIT. (Ironically, his PhD had been on neural networks, but he had grown disillusioned with them.) In 1969, Minsky and his colleague Seymour Papert published Perceptrons, a book detailing the shortcomings of the eponymous algorithm, with example after example of simple things it couldn’t learn. The simplest one—and therefore the most damning—was the exclusive-OR function, or XOR for short, which is true if one of its inputs is true but not both.