Hacker News Reader

You don't need to focus on just one side or the other. AlphaGo wasn't made by just hacking together a couple neural nets, it built on heuristic search, MCTS, and the "old-school" AI.

I agree that basic statistics + Bishop's book is a great way to start getting into machine learning -- but AI is a much broader field than that.

View on HN

"old-school" AI is just a pretentious name for algorithms/graph theory/combinatorics, plus a bit of (now very outdated) PLT mixed in.

"new-school" AI (machine learning) is just a more pretentious name for statistics/control theory/randomized algorithms.

What is to say the human brain doesn't engage in graph combinotrics with some learned heuristics.

Some of the old ideas with enough computation power are actually pretty amazing.

Because the human brain isn't a symbolic machine. It's a living organism made up of cells trying to survive and reproduce in the real world. All our symbol manipulation capabilities are built up on older abilities based on feeling, experiencing, socializing, and moving about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com