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Comment by pkaye | Hacker News Reader

I'm still not clear on the difference between deep learning and machine learning. Also are there good primer books on machine learning fundamentals?

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It _is_ a subfield of machine learning, based on neural networks and usually the features are learned and not engineered.

Could it be said machine learning is more surface AI like quality scores.

Whereas deep learning is going down the creating consciousness route?

You could say it, but it wouldn't actually mean anything.

That's a little breathless - I'd just think of it as a particular subset of machine learning that's produced some promising results, and leave talk of consciousness out of it.

Yeah I see what you mean, plus consciousness is more of a buzzword now and too arbitrary.

I found that talking about it along the lines or neural networking seems to be more accurate

Not really. Deep learning is the popular name for neural nets that use many layers (deep neural nets or DNNs). They are being used to do more than just pattern recognition (the mainstay use for NNs in the past). But at present DNNs do not attempt to solve complex/compound AI problems like planning or knowledge representation or understanding natural language semantics. It's not clear yet whether DNNs can be extended to those kinds of problems.

"The Nature of Code" is a book I've heard repeated is pretty good.

It's free to browse online if your interested:

http://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-10-neural-networks/

I've gone through much of this book. It's really good, but it's definitely not a book on machine learning fundamentals - more on complexity and simulations.

That chapter however is a nice intro to neural networks, and the previous chapter is a nice intro to genetic algorithms.

Machine learning is the name of the whole field, deep learning is one of the (currently very popular) branches of that field.

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