Anyway, just read "The Master Algorithm" by Pedro Domingoes. Fantastic read. The most interesting part to me was his survey of the five tribes of machine learning: symbolists, connectionists, geneticists, Bayesians and analogists.

After the survey he goes on to talk about some other aspects. And then discusses Alchemy and the possibility of uniting the techniques of all five tribes into one algorithm (hence the title).

I found his writing on a dense subject easy to read and great at conveying the concepts. Well worth checking out.

Edited for typos