Machine learning: What is it and how does it work?

We have to go back to the 19th century to find of the mathematical challenges that set the stage for this technology. For example, Bayes' theorem (1812) defined the probability of an event occurring based on knowledge of the previous conditions that could be related to this event. Years later, in the 1940s, another group of scientists laid the foundation for computer programming, capable of translating a series of instructions into actions that a computer could execute. These precedents made it possible for the mathematician Alan Turing, in 1950, to ask himself the question of whether it is possible for machines to think. This planted the seed for the creation of computers with artificial intelligence that are capable of autonomously replicating tasks that are typically performed by humans, such as writing or image recognition.