what does it mean for a machine to “learn?” How do we quantify something like skill growth when, for humans, learning is a subjective experience?

Question

what does it mean for a machine to “learn?” How do we quantify something like skill growth when, for humans, learning is a subjective experience?

In: 4

Answer 1

Simply put, it means it’s better at doing the same task.

For example, if you’ve created a machine that recognises whether a photo is a picture of a horse or a picture of a house, then “learning” means it improves its rate of successfully deteremining which is which.

It’s not really referring to the subjective experience that we talk about when humans learn–we don’t expect the machine to actually understand what it’s doing. What it’s learned is that this set of calculations produces better results than what it was doing previously.

Basically, we can only teach machines to do things we can quantify. You can’t teach a machine to “make good art” unless you can define what you mean by “good art” in a way the computer can measure.