What is Machine Learning?
And What is Deep Learning?
In the previous post, we discussed the definition of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that The Singularity uses. To refresh, AI is any intelligence displayed by a machine, where “intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments” (Legg and Hutter, 2007). In the same post, a definition of Machine Learning (ML) was given:
Machine Learning happens when a machine, over a period of time, gets better at a task it wasn’t explicitly told how to do.
As the reader can imagine, getting better at a task can help one to better achieve one’s goal. For example, an AI engineer could build an AI with the goal of playing Connect Four at a high level. Learning to play Connect Four could obviously help with that goal and thus with increasing the AI’s intelligence. Therefore, ML is a category within AI.
How Does Machine Learning Work?
There are different approaches to doing ML, but a very popular approach is to use an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). ANNs come in different forms. To use one for our earlier example of learning to play Connect Four, imagine the following. To play Connect Four well, one has to know what board states are…
