General Description
A book of 336 pages, consisting of 10 chapters. No code, no images, almost all of the book's content is text with rare graph inserts. Reading difficulty level - easy.
Content and Brief Overview
Since the content is small and compact, I'll list its points below, then describe the book's purpose, and finally give my opinion.
- Chapter 1. The Machine Learning Revolution
- Chapter 2. Lord of the Algorithms
- Chapter 3. Hume's Problem of Induction
- Chapter 4. How Does Our Brain Learn?
- Chapter 5. Evolution: Nature's Learning Algorithm
- Chapter 6. In the Sanctuary of Reverend Bayes
- Chapter 7. You Are What You Resemble
- Chapter 8. Unsupervised Learning
- Chapter 9. The Puzzle Pieces Fall into Place
- Chapter 10. The World of Machine Learning
The book attempts to tell about five key approaches to machine learning - symbolists, Bayesians, connectionists, evolutionists, and analogists. The author speculates that it would be great to combine them into one universal algorithm. He also reflects on the future of AI, its impact on society, economy, and other areas. By the way, the book was written before the neural networks we're familiar with today appeared, so how relevant the information is and how right the author turned out to be - you can evaluate for yourself.
Opinion
And even though my notes took as many as 9 pages, the information seemed quite useless. A very abstract book about neural networks and machine learning. If you want to learn about symbolists, connectionists, evolutionists, Bayesians, analogists and their vision of building machine learning, then you should still read this book. I often like to read books of this kind where you can get acquainted with the author's thoughts and views (moreover, I myself have written several such books on other topics), but I definitely won't reread this book. Perhaps for someone it might seem interesting, but for me it's dry and boring theory. At most, I would recommend listening to it in audiobook version (if such exists) on a walk, run, or during other similar activities, but I won't recommend reading this book thoroughly.
