Programmers contemplating the automation of programming:
"To lift some of these limitations and start competing with human brains, we need to move away from straightforward input-to-output mappings, and on to reasoning and abstraction. A likely appropriate substrate for abstract modeling of various situations and concepts is that of computer programs. We have said before (Note: in Deep Learning with Python) that machine learning models could be defined as "learnable programs"; currently we can only learn programs that belong to a very narrow and specific subset of all possible programs. But what if we could learn any program, in a modular and reusable way? Let's see in the next post what the road ahead may look like."
The author said in a Twitter conversation today that he is aware that this phrase is ignoring something essential - namely, that we have systems with memory and attention. That is something different than simple X to y mappings. With memory you can do general computation, recursivity, graphs, anything. They work well on some problems such as translation, but still need to become much better in order to match general purpose programming. But at least we're past the X->y phase.
considering they're the author of a python based machine learning library I would sure hope so. Still it seems like a pretty grievous oversight in writing the dang thing at all considering how at least in my fields of research memory-ful networks are increasingly popular.
"To lift some of these limitations and start competing with human brains, we need to move away from straightforward input-to-output mappings, and on to reasoning and abstraction. A likely appropriate substrate for abstract modeling of various situations and concepts is that of computer programs. We have said before (Note: in Deep Learning with Python) that machine learning models could be defined as "learnable programs"; currently we can only learn programs that belong to a very narrow and specific subset of all possible programs. But what if we could learn any program, in a modular and reusable way? Let's see in the next post what the road ahead may look like."