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On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning

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Berechenbarkeit der Welt?

Zusammenfassung

At the Brains, Minds, and Machines symposium held during MIT’s 150th birthday party, Technology Review reports that Prof. Noam Chomsky derided researchers in machine learning who use purely statistical methods to produce behavior that mimics something in the world, but who don’t try to understand the meaning of that behavior. This essay discusses what Chomsky said, speculates on what he might have meant, and tries to determine the truth and importance of his claims.

This essay first appeared on Peter Norvig’s blog: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html

Peter Norvig is a Director of Research at Google Inc; previously he directed Google’s core search algorithms group. He is co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field, and co-teacher of an Artificial Intelligence class that signed up 160,000 students, helping to kick off the current round of massive open online classes. He is a fellow of the AAAI, ACM, California Academy of Science and American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

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Correspondence to Peter Norvig .

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Norvig, P. (2017). On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning. In: Pietsch, W., Wernecke, J., Ott, M. (eds) Berechenbarkeit der Welt?. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-12153-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-12153-2_3

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