The Master Algorithm Quotes

“machine learning is the art of making false assumptions and getting away with it.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“John von Neumann, one of the founding fathers of computer science, famously said that “with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“We should therefore welcome with open arms computers that are vastly more powerful than our brains, safe in the knowledge that our job is exponentially easier than theirs. They have to solve the problems; we just have to check that they did so to our satisfaction. AIs will think fast what we think slow, and the world will be the better for it. I, for one, welcome our new robot underlings.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“One of the most important problems in machine learning—and life—is the exploration-exploitation dilemma. If you’ve found something that works, should you just keep doing it? Or is it better to try new things, knowing it could be a waste of time but also might lead to a better solution? Would you rather be a cowboy or a farmer? Start a company or run an existing one? Go steady or play the field? A midlife crisis is the yearning to explore after many years spent exploiting.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“But machine learning is the art of making false assumptions and getting away with it. As the statistician George Box famously put it: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” An oversimplified model that you have enough data to estimate is better than a perfect one that you don’t.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“contrary to popular belief, politics is not mainly about liberals versus conservatives. Rather, people differ along two main dimensions: one for economic issues and one for social ones.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Machine learning is the latest chapter in the arms race of life on Earth,”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“some thinkers are foxes—they know many small things—and some are hedgehogs—they know one big thing.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Data and intuition are like horse and rider, and you don’t try to outrun a horse; you ride it.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“The more context a job requires, the less likely a computer will be able to do it soon.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“the unified learner we’ve arrived at uses MLNs as the representation, posterior probability as the evaluation function, and genetic search coupled with gradient descent as the optimizer.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“If we switched to Markov networks, we could use any logical formula as a template for Markov network features, and that would unify logic and graphical models.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“mastering Tetris—really mastering it—is one of the most useful things you could ever do. If you can solve Tetris, you can solve thousands of the hardest and most important problems in science, technology, and management—all in one fell swoop. That’s because at heart they are all the same problem. This is one of the most astonishing facts in all of science.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“if you give the learner enough of the appropriate data, it can approximate any function arbitrarily closely—which is math-speak for learning anything.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“computer science has traditionally been all about thinking deterministically, but machine learning requires thinking statistically.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“psychologist Don Norman coined the term conceptual model to refer to the rough knowledge of a technology we need to have in order to use it effectively.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Despite all its successes, machine learning is still in the alchemy stage of science.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Newton did a lot of attribute selection when he decided that all that matters for predicting an object’s trajectory is its mass—not its color, smell, age, or myriad other properties.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“In any area of science, if a theory cannot be expressed as an algorithm, it’s not entirely rigorous.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Algorithms are an exacting standard. It’s often said that you don’t really understand something until you can express it as an algorithm.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“The nervous system of the C. elegans worm consists of only 302 neurons and was completely mapped in 1986, but we still have only a fragmentary understanding of what it does.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“leading proponents of the idea that human intelligence boils down to a single algorithm, and all we need to do is figure it out.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Some neurons have short axons and some have exceedingly long ones, reaching clear from one side of the brain to the other. Placed end to end, the axons in your brain would stretch from Earth to the moon.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“In particular, the computer can use speed to make up for lack of connectivity, using the same wire a thousand times over to simulate a thousand wires.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Symbolism is the shortest path to the Master Algorithm.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Overfitting happens when you have too many hypotheses and not enough data to tell them apart.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“The Master Algorithm would provide a unifying view of all of science and potentially lead to a new theory of everything.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“OK, some say, machine learning can find statistical regularities in data, but it will never discover anything deep, like Newton’s laws. It arguably hasn’t yet, but I bet it will.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Evolution, then, is another promising path to the Master Algorithm.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World