“Symbolist machine learning is an offshoot of the knowledge engineering school of AI. In the 1970s, so-called knowledge-based systems scored some impressive successes, and in the 1980s they spread rapidly, but then they died out. The main reason they did was the infamous knowledge acquisition bottleneck: extracting knowledge from experts and encoding it as rules is just too difficult, labor-intensive, and failure-prone to be viable for most problems. Letting the computer automatically learn to, say, diagnose diseases by looking at databases of past patients’ symptoms and the corresponding outcomes turned out to be much easier than endlessly interviewing doctors. Suddenly, the work of pioneers like Ryszard Michalski, Tom Mitchell, and Ross Quinlan had a new relevance, and the field hasn’t stopped growing since. (Another important problem was that knowledge-based systems had trouble dealing with uncertainty, of which more in Chapter 6.)”