With wit, vision, and scholarship, Domingos describes how these scientists are creating programs that allow a computer to...
Traditionally, the only way to make a computer execute a task is to write precise instructions: an algorithm. As the author notes in this enthusiastic but not dumbed-down introduction to machine learning, it is impossible to “write a program to tell a computer how to drive a car or decipher handwriting, but if we give enough examples to a computer running a learning algorithm, it will figure out how to do it on its own.”
The ultimate learning program, writes Domingos (Computer Science/Univ. of Washington), is the master algorithm, and the process is well underway to allow computers to function creatively. Data alone is not enough. Defeating the world’s greatest chess or Jeopardy players was a matter of brute force, but simpler computers running learning programs already beat talent scouts in baseball, connoisseurs in wine tasting, and doctors in disease diagnosis. Though lucid and consistently informative, Domingos’ explanation of how a variety of scientific schools approaches the master algorithm requires close attention from readers. Symbolists believe that intelligence emerges from manipulating symbols, just as mathematicians solve equations by replacing expressions with other expressions. Connectionists try to reverse-engineer the brain. Evolutionaries write programs that change in ways similar to natural selection. Bayesians know that all learned knowledge is uncertain, so they emphasize 18th-century English clergyman Thomas Bayes’ theorem, which can handle probabilistic inference. Finally, analogizers search for similarities in data and write code that combines them to make new predictions. “Armed with your new understanding of machine learning,” writes the author, “you’re in a much better position to think about issues like privacy and data sharing, the future of work, robot warfare, and the promise and peril of AI.”
With wit, vision, and scholarship, Domingos describes how these scientists are creating programs that allow a computer to teach itself. Readers unfamiliar with logic and computer theory will have a difficult time, but those who persist will discover fascinating insights.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0465065707
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
A facile narrative about haves traveling in a land of have-nots.
An engineer and novelist’s account of how he traveled from Louisiana to Panama in an electric car.
Successful but bored with the “yuppie robot” he had become, Louisiana native Denmon (Lords of an Empty Land, 2015, etc.) decided he needed to “get off the grid, away from the cell phones and emails.” So he and a peripatetic college friend named Dean packed Denmon’s new Tesla Model S electric car with a GPS, two long, 240-volt extension cords, and “all the plugs and adapters I could lay my hands on” and headed south across the Rio Grande. Beyond possible encounters with crooked immigration agents, drug lords, carjackers, and roving bandits, they faced other dangers and challenges. Fully charged and traveling on flat, well-paved roads at an average of 65 miles per hour, the Tesla had a driving range of 265 miles. However, the terrain they encountered between Mexico and Panama was highly unpredictable, and the roads were often covered with large asphalt chunks that they had to dodge in order to avoid damaging a car that sat “six inches—at best—off the ground.” Finding locations where they could charge the car also proved difficult. “It would likely take all of our creative juices and ad-libbing to keep the sleek, high-tech machine moving south every day,” writes the author. Sometimes, they found hotels with the electrical outlets they needed; other times they had to beg and bribe and make due with whatever equipment they found. Denmon’s experiment in high-tech travel through the developing world is intriguing, but his observations about the countries through which he traveled are as limited and simplistic as they are pedestrian. With the exceptions of Costa Rica, “the planet’s biggest natural amusement park,” and former American protectorate Panama, Denmon typically depicts Central America as consistently dangerous and primitive and the U.S. as a place that has the “comforts that most of the world craves.”
A facile narrative about haves traveling in a land of have-nots.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-1739-8
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary, pathbreaking scholarly achievement: an annotated anthology of interpretations of ancient (mostly 100 b.c.300 a.d.) interpretations of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) culled from hundreds of sources. ``Interpretation'' here often refers to the homiletical expansion of a biblical narrative—known in the Jewish tradition as midrash—particularly to fill in narrative gaps and vague allusions, or to resolve morally problematic passages. Kugel, a professor of Hebrew literature and the Bible at Harvard and Israel's Bar-Ilan University, notes in a penetrating opening essay that his focus is on ``exegetical motifs.'' He notes basic principles that underlie ancient biblical interpretation, including a view of the Scriptures as ``omnisignificant,'' that is, containing meaning in even the smallest details. Jewish and Christian exegetes also expanded the prosaic to lend greater resonance to seemingly minor matters. For example, Rabbi Simeon Bar Yochai interpreted Deuteronomy 27:17, ``Cursed be he who displaces his neighbor's boundary-mark,'' and Proverbs 22:28, ``Do not displace that boundary mark of old set by your father,'' by adding, ``If you see a custom of your forefathers observed, do not reject it.'' Thus, a law whose literal focus was on property was homiletically expanded to emphasize the ``boundary'' of religious tradition. Kugel's great achievement is to demonstrate again and again, with hundreds of fascinating examples, how the integrity of the text was both respected and reinterpreted by authors as varied as those of the apocrypha, the earliest midrashim, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as the early Church fathers. His own interpretive comments are consistently clear and engaging. This volume, which will be savored by both Jewish and Christian lovers of Scripture, richly illustrates Kugel's point that what we know as ``the Bible'' is really a series of texts filtered through the imaginative perceptions of its ancient exegetes. (24 illustrations, not seen) (History Book Club main selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-674-06940-4
Page Count: 700
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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