Chapter 1Introduction to Machine Learning
Hello, and welcome to the exciting world of machine learning. If you have never heard of machine learning until now, you may be tempted to think that it is a recent innovation in computer science that will result in sentient computer programs, significantly more intelligent than humans that will one day make humans obsolete. Fortunately, there is very little truth in that idea of machine learning. For starters, it is not a recent development; computer scientists have been researching for decades ways to make computers more intelligent by attempting to find ways to teach computers to make generalizations and predictions much like humans do. However, intelligence is not just about recognizing things, and even the best machine learning systems today are not capable of reasoning like human beings. The machine learning systems that exist today are essentially pattern recognizers and can, for instance, examine a picture and detect a cup of tea close to the edge of a table. They cannot, however, reason that the cup could accidentally fall off the table, as it is too close to the edge.
Machine learning specifically deals with the problem of creating computer programs that can generalize and predict information reliably, quickly, and with accuracy resembling what ...
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