Machine Learning Has Arrived!

Over the last quarter of a century, machine learning has become one of the most important parts of the information technology revolution impacting our lives. Artificial intelligence, the field from which machine learning emerged, attempts to make machines mimic the way humans think. Machine learning is the subfield of artificial intelligence that “gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed,” a definition attributed to Arthur Samuel, who applied machine learning to play checkers, starting a tradition of using games as a testbed for machine learning algorithms. Initially, research in artificial intelligence tackled problems that are intellectually difficult for human beings, but relatively straightforward for computers, problems that can be addressed by an algorithm expressed in rules identified