WHAT IS MACHINE LEARNING ?
Even among machine learning practitioners, there isn't a well accepted definition of what is and what isn't machine learning. But let me show you a couple of examples of the ways that people have tried to define it. Here's a definition of what is machine learning as due to Arthur Samuel.
He defined machine learning as the field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly learned.Samuel's claim to fame was that back in the 1950, he wrote a checkers playing program and the amazing thing about this checkers playing program was that Arthur Samuel himself wasn't a very good checkers player. But what he did was he had to programmed maybe tens of thousands of games against himself, and by watching what sorts of board positions tended to lead to wins and what sort of board positions tended to lead to losses, the checkers playing program learned over time what are good board positions and what are bad board positions. And eventually learn to play checkers better than the Arthur Samuel himself was able to. This was a remarkable result. Arthur Samuel himself turns out not to be a very good checkers player. But because a computer has the patience to play tens of thousands of games against itself, no human has the patience to play that many games. By doing this, a computer was able to get so much checkers playing experience that it eventually became a better checkers player than Arthur himself.
