On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning

1 · Peter Norvig · May 27, 2011, midnight
At the MIT 150 symposium, Chomsky said that the notion of success used by statistical language models (namely, that they successfully predict the world and allow programs to accomplish tasks) was "very novel ... I don't know of anything like it in the history of science." This essay argues that it is not novel at all, but perfectly commonplace....