A Short History of Machine Learning

It's all well and good to ask if androids dream of electric sheep, but science fact has evolved to a point where it's beginning to coincide with science fiction. No, we don't have autonomous androids struggling with existential crises -- yet -- but we are getting ever closer to what people tend to call "artificial intelligence." Machine Learning is a sub-set of artificial intelligence where computer algorithms are used to autonomously learn from data and information. In machine learning computers don't have to be explicitly programmed but can change and improve their algorithms by themselves. Today, machine learning algorithms enable computers to communicate with humans, autonomously drive cars, write and publish sport match reports, and find terrorist suspects.