Machine Learning, Simply Explained

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. 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. Instead, we need to teach it by showing it examples of foods ("labeled training data"), some of which are yummy foods ("positive examples") and some of which are yucky foods ("negative examples").