Skip to main content

The Master Algorithm - Pedro Domingos ***

I am really struggling to remember a book that has irritated me as much as this one, which is a shame because it's on a very interesting and significant subject. Pedro Domingos takes us into the world of computer programs that solve problems through learning, exploring everything from back propagating neural networks to Bayesian algorithms, looking for the direction in which we might spot the computing equivalent of the theory of everything, the master algorithm that can do pretty much anything that can be done with a computer (Turing proved a long time ago that there will always be some things that can't). As the subtitle puts it, this is the quest for the ultimate learning machine that will remake our world.

So far, so good. Not only an interesting subject but one I have a personal interest in as I had some involvement in artificial intelligence many moons ago. But just reading the prologue put my hackles up. It was one of those descriptions of how a technology influences every moment of your life, as the author takes us through a typical day. Except 90% of his examples have only ever been experienced by a Silicon Valley geek, and those that the rest of us have come across, like algorithms to make recommendations to you on shopping websites and video streaming sites, in my experience, are always so terrible that they are almost funny.

The pain carries on in part because of a kind of messianic fervour for the topic that means that the author seems convinced it is about to totally takeover the world - and like most fanatics, he presents this view while viciously attacking everyone who disagrees, from the likes of Marvin Minsky and Noam Chomsky to Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It's interesting that Domingos is totally dismissive of the early knowledge engineers who thought their methodology would take over the world, but can't see that his own pursuit of the 'master algorithm' (think of Lord of the Rings, but substitute 'algorithm' for 'ring') is equally likely to be a pursuit that is much easier to theorise about than to bring to success.

To make matters worse, Domingos repeatedly claims, for instance, that thanks to learning algorithms it's possible to predict the movement of the stock market, or to predict the kind of 'black swan' events that Taleb shows so convincingly are unpredictable. Yet I have never seen any evidence that this is true, it seems to go totally against what we know from chaos theory, and Domingos doesn't present any evidence, he just states it as fact. (Could you really have predicted the existence of black swans before they were discovered? How about blue ones?)

One other problem I have with the book is that the author isn't very good at explaining the complexities he is dealing with. I've seen many explanations of Bayesian statistics over the years, for instance, and this was one of the most impenetrable I've ever seen.

I can't tell you to avoid this book, because I've not come across another that introduces the whole range of machine learning options in the way that Domingos does. But any recommendation has to be made through gritted teeth because I did not like the way that information was put across.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Steven Pinker *****

In the past I've found Steven Pinker's books hypnotic - I drift along enjoying the words and feeling I'm getting something deep from it without anything much sinking in. This one was different - it was sometimes a little harder to get your head around the underlying concept, descending as it tends to into infinite regression, but overall I did feel I'd gained a lot.  Pinker's focus here is 'common knowledge' which is when not only do we both/all know something, but we know that the other(s) know as well and the implications this has for human interactions. One entertaining thing to emerge from this is the ability to get into infinite loops of the 'I know that you know that I know that...' variety. Although we aren't mentally equipped to deal with more than a handful of iterations, we are told that a simple but limited interaction like a text exchange strictly needs the full infinite set to be definitive. For example, if you and a friend are tryin...
Post a Comment
Read more