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How do you explain machine learning to a child? Answer by Daniel Tunkelang, data scientist, search/discovery expert, led teams at LinkedIn and Google, on Quora. I'd pick a universally accessible binary classification problem: learning which foods are yummy and which are yucky. We want to teach a computer to recognize which foods are yummy and which foods are yucky. But the computer doesn't have a mouth or any way of tasting the food.