A friend of mine who is about to start a career in artificial intelligence research recently asked what I wish I had known when I started two years ago. Below are some lessons I have learned so far. They range from general life lessons to relatively specific tricks of the AI trade.
I hope others find them useful.
Source: mit.edu
Half a century ago, the pioneers of chaos theory discovered that the “butterfly effect” makes long-term prediction impossible. Even the smallest perturbation to a complex system (like the weather, the economy or just about anything else) can touch off a concatenation of events that leads to a dramatically divergent future. Unable to pin down the state of these systems precisely enough to predict how they’ll play out, we live under a veil of uncertainty.
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