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Re:No Silver Bullet (1986) [pdf] by otabdeveloper4 on Thursday August 29, 2019 @09:20AM (#20829218)
> The one advance that might finally challenge the 'no silver bullet' rule is machine learning.

Machine learning can't even predict a simple binary proportion ratio. No, it's not a silver bullet.

Re:No Silver Bullet (1986) [pdf] by arithma on Friday August 30, 2019 @06:39AM (#20837343)
Can you elaborate on that just a bit, I couldn't find anything relevant by doing a quick search for a few combinations of those keywords.
Re:No Silver Bullet (1986) [pdf] by otabdeveloper4 on Friday August 30, 2019 @09:34AM (#20838414)
I'm not smart enough to go into the technical details, so I'll use an example instead.

Machine learning is very effective in categorizing things - for example, given an image estimate whether it pictures a cancer cell or not.

On the other hand, machine learning sucks where you need to predict things instead of categorizing - for example, given a set of factors, figure out your risk of getting cancer within 5 years.

Any such machine learning predictive system will be useless due to under- or overfitting.

(Again, I'm not an expert, just a guy who has many years of experience trying to build such predictive systems.)

Re:No Silver Bullet (1986) [pdf] by hoseja on Friday August 30, 2019 @09:32AM (#20838387)
They may mean machine-learning-assisted branch predictors. No clue otherwise.