The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

Acknowledgments

First of all, I thank my companions in scientific adventure: students, collaborators, colleagues, and everyone in the machine-learning community. This is your book as much as mine. I hope you will forgive my many oversimplifications and omissions, and the somewhat fanciful way in which parts of the book are written.

I’m grateful to everyone who read and commented on drafts of the book at various stages, including Mike Belfiore, Thomas Dietterich, Tiago Domingos, Oren Etzioni, Abe Friesen, Rob Gens, Alon Halevy, David Israel, Henry Kautz, Chloé Kiddon, Gary Marcus, Ray Mooney, Kevin Murphy, Franzi Roesner, and Ben Taskar. Thanks also to everyone who gave me pointers, information, or help of various kinds, including Tom Griffiths, David Heckerman, Hannah Hickey, Albert-László Barabási, Yann LeCun, Barbara Mones, Mike Morgan, Peter Norvig, Judea Pearl, Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, and Sebastian Seung.

I’m lucky to work in a very special place, the University of Washington’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. I’m also grateful to Josh Tenenbaum, and to everyone in his group, for hosting the sabbatical at MIT during which I started this book. Thanks to Jim Levine, my indefatigable agent, for drinking the Kool-Aid (as he put it) and spreading the word; and to everyone at Levine Greenberg Rostan. Thanks to TJ Kelleher, my amazing editor, for helping make this a better book, chapter by chapter, line by line; and to everyone at Basic Books.

I’m indebted to the organizations that have funded my research over the years, including ARO, DARPA, FCT, NSF, ONR, Ford, Google, IBM, Kodak, Yahoo, and the Sloan Foundation.

Last and most, I thank my family for their love and support.