Part II - Machine Learning and Deep Learning

Here we start the “cookbook” part of this book that comprises many small program examples to solve specific problems that I expect you may encounter in your work.

When I started working in the field of AI in 1982 everything I did was symbolic AI and this lasted until 1988 when I started using neural networks to solve practical engineering problems at work, participated in a one year DARPA neural network advisory panel, and wrote the first version of the SAIC ANSim neural network toolkit. Since then most of my work has involved machine learning and specifically neural networks but I was motivated to include the overview material on symbolic AI in this book because I don’t personally believe that distributed neural network machine learning is the final word in cognitive computing and AI. I think that the next major advancement in our field will be hybrid symbolic and neural systems so mentioning symbolic AI seems appropriate.