Synced LeCun vs Rahimi: Has Machine Learning Become Alchemy?

The medieval art of alchemy was once believed capable of creating gold and even human immortality. The trial-and-error method was however gradually abandoned after pioneers like Issac Newton introduced the science of physics and chemistry in the 1700s. But now, some machine learning researchers are wondering aloud whether today's artificial intelligence research has become a new sort of alchemy. The debate started with Google's Ali Rahimi, winner of the Test-of-Time award at the recent Conference on Neural Information Processing (NIPS). Rahimi put it bluntly in his NIPS presentation: "Machine learning has become alchemy."