michael_nielsen

(I get occasional emails from people looking to cite the book, telling me some journal editor wants to know where "Determination Press" is located. I've so far resisted replying "Everywhere", and just demurely tell them "San Francisco".)

To sum up: open access makes material freely available to people who would otherwise never even hear about it. This amplifying effect is not small, it is enormous. And it applies in parts of the world woefully underserved by the existing publication system.

To finish: a couple of short, standalone essays within the book that you may enjoy. Written for a general audience. On whether there is a simple algorithm for intelligence: http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/sai.html 

On whether deep learning will soon lead to truly general artificial intelligence (scroll down a bit): http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap6.html#on_the_future_of_neural_networks …

I've always liked this (or rather ever since you wrote it). I have a very similar optimistic attitude to the narrower question of whether there is a simple principle underlying our ability to find proofs of theorems. I am, perhaps irrationally, convinced that there is.

Have you written on this at all? (Would be delighted to see if so.)

Not yet, but I definitely want to before I get too much older. It's quite hard though, because it's still more of a hunch than something I can definitively justify, though I do have fairly detailed thoughts about what a set of simple principles might look like.