When a website recommends a book or a movie, gives you a list of companies looking for employees with your skill sets or finds a date online, algorithms are behind these choices. Based on bits of data that are analyzed in specific ways, algorithms--"a sequence of instructions telling a computer what to do"--play an increasingly important role in today's computer-science based society. In The Master Algorithm, Pedro Domingos, professor of computer science at the University of Washington, elucidates this complex world in relatively easy-to-follow language, and shows how and why people are on the hunt for the one perfect algorithm or computer program that will teach itself to process data. For instance, with a master algorithm, cancer treatments could be designed to treat patients as individuals rather than part of a subset, and super robots, rather than soldiers, could be used to fight wars.
Domingos does a good job of breaking down the intricacy of the cyber world that powers search engines and websites. He enthusiastically explains how five different factions (symbolists, connectionists, evolutionaries, Bayesians and analogizers) work so that laypeople can understand the terminology and convolutions of machine learning, and delves into the ethical, moral and social impacts these tribes have as well. The Master Algorithm is not a light read, but it opens the doorway to a world many of us never see or think about, though it has a tremendous impact on our daily lives. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer