"When I was young, I often pondered over what to do in my life. The most exciting thing, to me, seemed to be able to solve the riddles of the universe. That entailed becoming a physicist. However, I soon realized that there might be something even grander. What if I were to try build a machine, which becomes a much better physicist than I could ever hope to be. Perhaps, this is how I can multiply my tiny bit of creativity, into eternity."
– Jeurgen Schmidthuber, co-inventor of the Long Short-Term Memory network
In his diploma thesis in 1987, Schmidthuber theorized a mechanism of meta-learning that would be capable of inspecting its own learning algorithm and subsequently modifying it to effectively optimize the very mechanism of learning it employs. This idea entails opening up the learning space to the system itself so it can iteratively...