As Wikipedia puts it , Learning is the act of acquiring new, or modifying and reinforcing, existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. Living beings have a natural tendency to learn and adapt to the environment they survive in. Humans started training machines in a hope to build Expert Systems and succeeded well in line with Turing’s Test.
The Turing test is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.-Alan Turing
True intelligence known to human’s is the one exhibited by children and their ability to know, learn and understand their surroundings and react to situations , human like. We mainly try to define it in two major terms Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Emotional Quotient (EQ) . Simply put IQ is the ability to understand, comprehend, discover, and become aware of information. It also measures how we register or retrieve, how creative we are , how we comprehend and solve problems and also the ability to evaluate options. On the other hand EQ is the ability to put the solution to Action.
Humans have overtime built a complex structure in terms of the way the communicate , judge and respond . The likes of Watson that now having successfully solved the problem of translating the problem of having machines do the same. They have spent enormous time in building a platform and deliver hard assets enabling applications built on these utilities.
The Machine Learning Challenge?
The real secret of Humans is our ability to learn. Children prove that they are the best learners , but how do they do it ? How are they so creative and come up with imaginative responses.We are just impressed of their ability to Explore. (hence the motto of our company “ Exploring Intelligence”. Visit us at www.iavishkar.com and start contributing) . Exploring is the ability to continuously build upon what we we know, and engage in the process of learning and unlearning.
Can we have Machines do it ?
Nowadays almost everyone else trying to commercialize AI, from Google to Baidu, is focused on algorithms that roughly model the way neurons and synapses in the brain change as they are exposed to new information and experiences. This approach is known as Deep Learning and powerful hardware along with software models have allowed accuracy in how machines match, recognize images , speech with surpassed ability to process massive data mountains.
I would like to close my notes for the day with a simple test that I did with my four year old son. He is still learning numbers and I recently bought him a droid watch. He was really excited on the way he could now tell us time which me and my wife often refer to during our conversation. When I asked him to read time , he read it as “ zero one three four” . I repeated this exercise after some time and he reads it as “ Eleven zero four” . I was surprised that with his limited knowledge of knowing numbers from one to twenty he could comprehend and differentiate numbers from being read as single digit or double digit” . The next day I repeated a similar exercise with him by asking him to read from a piece of paper and have him read as follows :
-a single digit number – He reads “ 2 as two”
-a double digit number – He reads “ 16 as sixteen”
-a double digit number – He reads “ 23 as two three”
-a three digit number – He reads “ 234 as two three four”
-a three digit number – He reads “ 211 as two eleven”
-a four digit number – He reads “ 2112 as two eleven two”
-a five digit number – He reads “ 21124 as two one one two four” and
I ask myself , “ why he did not read it as “ eleven but read it as one and one” . The results varied and as I interacted with him he started reading it differently with each iteration under the assumption that he he knew only counting from one to twenty.
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